


Acute Angles

by prairiecrow



Series: Geometry [1]
Category: Knight Rider (1982), Torchwood
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Culture, Alien Invasion, Androids, Antidotes, Arguing, Art in Chapter Eleven, Countdown to Crisis, Denial, Dimension Travel, Dreams, Early Versions of Drugs Often Don't Work Very Well, Emotionally Compromised, End Game, Enemies to Friends, Ensemble Cast, Especially Games Of The Heart, Established Relationship, Everybody Gets a Chance to Shine, F/M, Fan Art, Final Gamble, First Time, Frottage, Grief/Mourning, Gwen and Jack Kiss, Imprisonment, Interrogation, Jack Harkness Flirts, Jack Harkness Really Will Tap Anything, Jack Has Always Been Exceedingly Good At Games, Jack and Gwen Unresolved Sexual Tension, Just Because You Can Fight Doesn't Mean You Know What To Do Next, M/M, Marriage, Memory Loss, Obsession, Oral Sex, Other, Owen Isn't Taking Any Of Jack's Bullshit, Pansexual Character, Parallel Universes, Pheromones, Polyamory, Pre-Slash, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Psychotropic Drugs, Regeneration, Rifts - Freeform, Rimming, Sacrifice, Sadism, Secret Names, Sexual Fantasy, The Author Reminds Readers That Canon Jack Weeps Fairly Openly, Threat of Physical Torture, Workplace Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-04 01:04:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 36,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A black car comes crashing through a Rift in downtown Cardiff, turns into a humanoid android that claims it actually WAS the car, and then insists that  it has to get back to 1987 to rescue its driver... what can Jack Harkness do except lock it up in the Vault until he can decide whether to find a use for it or destroy it? It doesn't help that the android is totally rocking the whole "stark naked" look and is entirely too human in emotional affect for anybody's comfort.</p><p>Then a previously unknown alien race with delusions of conquest comes through the Rift in the heart of the Hub, and Jack's day goes from annoying to potentially apocalyptic in two seconds flat. To make things even worse, the team's only hope for any kind of assistance lies in the highly intelligent and thoroughly pissed-off robot they just threw into a cell... will KITT elect to help them, or will he throw his lot in with the Vore in exchange for the possibility of a ticket back home?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The End Is Also The Beginning (T=0)

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place shortly after the events of "Adam" (2.05).

Once the team's physical injuries (all minor, for a change) had been treated by Owen and Tosh was well on her way to figuring out how the Vore had gotten into the Hub the first place, Jack went looking for their most recent visitor — or the one, at least, who hadn't threatened to exterminate the entire human species by bringing an army of alien soldiers through the Rift. The building was sealed, so their guest hadn't left the premises, and since it now knew the layout of the complex down to the last square inch thanks to its uplink to the Hub's computer systems Jack felt confident that it was in one of two possible places…

And his first guess turned out to be the correct one. He opened the door to Myfanwy's habitat just below the roof to find the cavernous room silent, moonlight pouring down on the forest of large ferns through the glass ceiling — and a figure standing squarely underneath the opening the pteranodon used to enter and exit her lair, its back to the door and arms folded across its well-defined chest, head tipped back to gaze up at the uncaring stars overhead while a trace of the night wind stirred its short shock of pale golden hair.

Jack wasn't particularly stealthy about closing the door behind him: the ears on this particular transdimensional traveller were very keen indeed. "Thought I might find you here," he remarked, sticking his hands into his pockets and strolling toward that slender erect form as if he wasn't in a particular hurry — as if, in fact, it didn't draw him with its own subtle magnetism, a nearly androgynous handsomeness that was no less attractive for having no heartbeat and no heat of blood beneath it. The image of its nakedness was burned into his memory, and under normal circumstances he would have had every intention of seeing more of that, provided it was willing to play those sorts of mammalian games.

The android acknowledged the informal greeting with a stiff little nod before turning on his heel, arms still folded, to study Jack's face keenly. _He_. Definitely male, for all that Jack had so recently seen what lay beneath his pale synthetic skin: wires and gears and a skeleton of titanium-laced alloys from the future of a parallel universe. And definitely appealing, for all that its eyes were utterly inhuman, their sheen of solid reflective blackness broken only by thin circlets of red radiance that were constantly expanding and contracting like the contours of an ever-shifting iris. 

"I suppose I owe you a debt of gratitude," he said in a crisp dry voice inflected with a strong Boston accent," for not sealing me up in that dreadful Vault again."

"Yeah, well…" Jack came to a halt a few feet away, letting his gaze wander up and down the beauty his hands were itching to touch. Even wearing a grudgingly provided collection of Owen's spare clothes, scuffed runners and worn bluejeans and a rumpled off-white t-shirt and an old leather jacket, there was something perfectly composed about this robot, as if accidents of fashion couldn't touch his fundamental poise — or his pride. "When someone's willing to take a hit for us like that, we don't usually treat them like a prisoner of war afterwards."

"No," the android drawled, scanning his host up and down in turn with a nearly palpable intensity while the ebb and flow of light in his eyes telegraphed all kinds of opaque analyses, "I don't suppose you would."

Which made Jack smirk, because he recognized a backhanded compliment when he heard one and if you'd asked him two days ago whether or not a mechanical creation could have a sass quotient off the charts, he would have denied it to the death. "Did you know you were going to be able to regenerate after taking that backblast from the Rift?"

"I'd calculated the odds at less than ten percent," the robot responded instantly: "Eight point two seven percent, to be precise…" His voice trailed off, the emotional character of his sculpted face shifting from overtly sardonic to subtly troubled, and trails of etheric blue energy awoke and flowed briefly under his skin — up the lines of his throat, along the edges of his slim fingers in a way that caught the contours of the joints, in arcane delicate hieroglyphs from the outer corners of his ebony eyes — before he turned away again, sharply, as if he didn't want his distress to be seen —

— but only halfway. Only in profile, as if he needed connection even more than he needed privacy. 

Machines, in Jack's experience on a wide variety of worlds both on his own and in the company of the Doctor, didn't feel shame, but this time there was an ache in that tenor voice: "It should hurt more than this."

And this time Jack's up-and-down survey was prompted by wariness rather than sexual appetite. "I thought all the damage had been —"

"No," the android interjected tartly, "you may rest assured that I'm back in one piece physically. The regeneration was complete. This…" The stiffness of his shoulders held for another second and a half before crumbling inside Owen's loaned jacket. "This is far worse. Captain, I killed seven people today — they were people, weren't they? —"

Jack had to nod in response to that plaintive query: the truth mattered to this being, even if it exacerbated guilt.

"— not counting any who were caught in the closing of the Rift, and…" He shook his head, closing those brilliant eyes tightly, and visibly composed himself before continuing in a voice stretched taut over bones of sharp misery: "I was created with a dominant program, to protect human life, and by extension, all life. Today I acted in direct opposition to those directives. Under any other circumstances that should have triggered a hard shutdown, but now…"

Under his own normal circumstances — with another human being, or hell, with any creature of flesh and blood — Jack would have followed his instincts and stepped in close, providing comfort with the touch of a hand and an offered embrace. But this, this wasn't human or even organic, this was _Other_ in a way unusual even for Torchwood, a way that defied easy analysis and made relying on instinct a precarious proposition at best. Instead he watched and waited, his own heart tight in his throat.

"I'm clearly not who I used to be," the robot whispered at last, bowing his head, and this time the trace of blue that gleamed along the seam of his eyelids was neither subcutaneous nor ethereal, as pained as the grief in his voice: "I don't know what I am, anymore!"

"Hey, hey…" Tears were something he knew how to deal with: come around close in front of the person, reach out, lay a warm hand to their cheek and coax them to look up at you while soothing them:  "Whoever you are, you're just fine."

"If Michael were here, he'd know what to do." He raised his head obediently enough, but his eyes, when they cracked open, merely gazed at Jack's face without truly seeing him: the crimson indicators were flaring and contracting at high speed, indicating that he was occupied with processing high-density internal data. A shining cyan tear tracked slowly down his cheek, unheeded. "He always knew what to do. But he's not here. _I'm alone._ Do you understand what that means?" The widely ranging circlets abruptly contracted to a solid ring, focussing on the present, and he stared slightly up into Jack's attentive eyes, something like panic infusing his voice: "I was built to work in conjunction a human partner at all times. And I don't — I can't —"

He kept his voice calm, a guideline to reality. "You're not alone. KITT — _you're not alone_." He leaned in until his breath was warming those slightly parted artificial lips, gazing directly into the depths of the machine and speaking with absolute certainty. "You're with us, and we'll take care of you."

"Michael…" It was almost a moan, and he closed his eyes again, trying to look away, turning from Jack's hand. This time Jack caught his face in both hands, compelling him to remain centred, and after a brief shiver of resistance he obeyed the unspoken command. His tears were warm, and they tingled the tiniest bit against Jack's bare skin.

"We'll find him." He stroked those sharp cheekbones with his thumbs and ducked his chin a little to level a gaze even more commanding — and promising. "We'll get you home, I swear to you: _we will._ Come here."

KITT let himself be pulled in, although he was wooden in Jack's embrace. "I…"

"Come on." He wrapped both arms tightly around that slim body, all rangy muscle, and closed his right hand around the nape of its stiff neck. Even in resisting it fit against him in all the right ways, and a hot wire of eager lively lust entwined itself with the warmer substance of compassion. "I've got you. It's okay…"

He didn't expect the yielding so soon, the way KITT moved up against him and clung almost desperately, burrowing into the angle of his neck as if trying to hide from everything this horrible day had thrown at him, aching and breathless: "Captain…"

"Call me Jack," he invited, with a hint of a smile.

Another curt little nod and a huff of breath against his shoulder were the only concessions that perhaps, at some point in the future, that informality might be forthcoming. He smiled more widely and hugged the android tighter: it wasn't much, but considering they'd only known each other for twenty-one hours and change, and that most of that time had been spent fencing with each other to determine whether they were enemies or allies, it was a pretty damned good start.

"It's okay," he repeated softly against that golden hair that felt so real, "It'll be all right. You're one of us now, and we take care of our own."


	2. Chapter One: Car Crash (T-21.4)

Despite the numerous visits he'd paid to planets locked in ice, or even frozen in a combination of methane and perpetual night, it never ceased to amaze Jack how cold Cardiff could feel in comparison to those benighted worlds. Something to do with the humidity, probably, and being out in the sullen blackness of nearly three in the morning certainly didn't help him feel any warmer.

"Straight ahead, sixty-two point four metres," Tosh announced as they all piled out of the parked Torchwood SUV, she and Jack and Owen and Gwen, at the extreme south end of Womanby Street. 

"How big is it now?" Jack snapped as he set off north up the middle of the street at a brisk pace, leaving it to Owen, who'd been behind the wheel, to make sure the vehicle was auto-locked. Half a second later a melodic chirp from the SUV confirmed that it had received and obeyed the keyring command. 

Tosh, hurrying to keep up with his longer stride, fell into place at his right and checked her readings again. "Ten point six by five point nine, holding steady at the same coordinates." 

Jack scowled briefly up at the thick puffy snowflakes drifting down from the low cloud cover that shrouded the city. "That's…"

And Tosh, bless her precision-oriented heart, knew exactly what calculation he was asking for. "A significant decrease in growth since it was initially detected seventeen minutes ago. It's stabilizing."

"How about the shift phase?"

"I'm still getting two temporal signatures, one recent, the other considerably less so." In response to the silent question he glanced down at her, she clarified: "The recent one is…" She tapped at the scanner's interface. "Within fifty years of our own time. The less recent one is reading as…" Tap-tap-tap. Frown. "I can't get a clear lock, but I'd say somewhat over two hundred years."

Gwen, at Jack's left elbow, huffed quietly at the ballparking. It was Owen, walking behind her with his hands jammed into the pockets of his too-thin-for-the-weather leather jacket, who sardonically vocalized all their thoughts: "Well, that's certainly helpful. Thank you, Tosh."

"I'll be able to get more precise readings once we're closer," she insisted. "The rift is remarkably volatile, almost as if…"

Gwen tossed a glance across Jack's chest, a crease appearing between her strongly drawn eyebrows. "Almost as if?"

"Almost as if somebody's trying to mask its signature," Tosh murmured, intent on her screen once more. "I'm trying to compensate…"

As they hastened toward whatever lay around bend in the street Jack kept his own silence, walking through the echoes of his own memories. This sky, the unusual snow lying thick on the ground and filling the air, the quality of the streetlights through its delicate haze — it reminded him of many things, but in particular of a port city on Aureta III where he'd met, wooed and bedded a reptilian hermaphrodite innkeeper who'd been more than willing to sneak into the old disused stables for a literal roll in the hay with a dashing traveller from parts unknown. He remembered the tang of hir subtly textured skin on his tongue and the glorious tint of hir golden eyes, gathering the lamplight into pools of radiance; he remembered lying bundled up with hir afterwards under a coarse blanket, sharing his precious body heat while snow drifted slowly and silently from the night sky beyond the stable's small window. He remembered it all with a clarity that warmed him even in the chill of a Cardiff winter night, and when he glanced sidelong at Gwen, so proud and graceful and beautiful at his side, all his flesh wakened with desire that was far more immediate than memory.

The ache beneath that lust was old, well-worn, familiar and almost friendly, like a stone kept in one's pocket that one's hand kept encountering whenever it reached inside. People in this century limited themselves to a single partner, as a rule, and Gwen had chosen hers: Jack's opportunity had passed months ago, if indeed it had ever existed, since he knew that trying to involve himself with a mate who expected sexual fidelity was an exercise doomed to end very badly for all concerned. He loved Gwen, yes — and he wanted her in his bed, beyond question — but not enough to risk everything they already had. Not enough to fracture the bonds of the team, _his_ team, so he left the embers to burn and turned his attention to his left wrist when they got within ten metres of two police cars blocking the turn in the road, hoping the damaged wrist strap could still tell him something about what they were going to face. 

The patterns it produced in response to his command were confounding: two intersecting slices of time were clearly present in conjunction with the rift, but the strap was having no better luck nailing down the specifics than Tosh's scanner.

"That's — not good," he muttered, coming to a halt and staring at the readings while Glen darted ahead to make nice with Constable Davidson, who was bundled up in a parka and didn't look pleased to be out and about on such a bleak winter morning.

Tosh and Owen took his cue to stop, and Owen stepped into Gwen's former position so they could both peer at the wrist strap — Tosh at least with a faint hope of understanding its readouts, Owen just to be pointed in his solicitous interest: "Oh dear… and what is the magic bracelet saying this time?"

"Something's masking the temporal signatures, all right — and that doesn't happen by accident." He closed the strap and lowered his arm, caught a nod from Gwen, and set off again toward the curve in the street, ducking between the police cars with Tosh close behind. "Tosh, try —"

"Adjusting the polarity of the proton flow," she concluded, "yes, I'm on it."

The cars were parked in the turn itself, and now a northern stretch of Womanby opened up in front of the them all — and there it was, less than twenty metres away, a shifting glowing golden haze framing a window into another world…

… a world that looked more than passingly familiar, especially to Jack's trained eyes. The rift opened into a wide expanse of asphalt on its far side, hot and tacky beneath a glaring summer sun, with a huge corrugated metal warehouse sprawling in the middle distance, and the trees beyond it, with their spreading green fronds above and loose skirts of brown tendrils hanging beneath — 

"I've got it!" Tosh announced as they stepped past the scattered line of staring policemen and all came to a halt. "It's Earth, nineteen eighty-seven! Analyzing geographic coordinates —"

"It's California." Jack took a step forward, scanning the vista spread out before them. Gwen was back on his right, doing the same; Owen, prudently, had remained a couple of metres behind the rest of them, between the bumpers of the parked cars. "But there were never any reports of temporal anomalies this —" 

A shout interrupted him — a shout from inside the rift, even though nobody was visible in the "frame" of the picture:

" _Hey!_ " It was slightly distorted by the spatial-temporal displacement, but definitely male and full of command. "Stop!" Then, a second later, more conversationally but still urgently: "I've got him, buddy — take out the other one!"

A running figure appeared, rounding the corner of the warehouse and pelting toward the rift at full speed. Jack recalled some pretty strange fashions from the nineteen eighties, but this ensemble — full leather red-brown catsuit, long thin cloak of brilliant purple fur, goggles concealing the eyes — defied even the most avant garde trends of that era, and something about the build of the runner, while definitely female, also wasn't quite human. She hadn't gotten more than twenty running strides before something else appeared around the same corner, skidding on four wheels — a vehicle almost mirror-bright in the summer sunshine, low and sleek and pitch black except for a tracking flash of red light embedded at the point of its hood.

Off-"screen", there were sounds of combat: feet hitting asphalt, grunts of impact. The car put on a burst of smooth acceleration and caught the runner effortlessly, swerving at the last possible second to clip her left thigh with its prow: she went down as if shot, tumbling across the pavement and collapsing face-down. The car braked, and for a second Jack found himself looking right into that line of red light — 

And then, unmistakably, the hissing pulse of energy fire. 

" _Michael!_ " This voice, higher-pitched than the first and outright alarmed, clearly came from the vehicle itself, and as it surged forward, hitting the zero-to-sixty mark in considerably less than three seconds, Jack could clearly see that there was nobody behind the wheel. 

The rift rippled as a bolt of red light sizzled across its face — not on the Cardiff side, and when it struck the car dead centre of its hood Jack expected to see a hole punched through the machine. The thing's gleaming shell protected it from the blast, but not from the energy transfer, and it flipped off its wheels as if hitting an immovable wall and launched into midair, tumbling end-over-end — 

One thing Jack had learned in all his decades of immortality was not to question his instincts. As the car hurtled toward the rift on its side he grabbed Tosh and pushed her hard to his right, flattening them both to the pavement and simultaneously yelling: 

" _Get down!_ "

Even the policemen scattered as the black machine, unable to stop, crossed the temporal barrier in an actinic flash of blinding light. It struck the pavement hard on its driver's side, leaving a huge divot in the snow, then bounced and rolled toward the parked police cars without appreciably losing speed — and without taking any apparent damage, except for one hubcap that sprung loose and arced away toward a shop window. 

The next sound Jack expected to hear was the crash of one or both police cars being smashed by the apparently unstoppable object, and he covered Tosh's fallen form with the shield of his own body, bracing for a rain of debris — 

— which never came. Instead he heard the clear, but small, shattering of the shop window's glass, and the distinctive flare of a rift phasing quickly in and out of existence…

… and nothing more, for a couple of seconds. Bent over Tosh, he raised his head and looked back over his shoulder — 

— just in time to hear another cry, this one much closer — 

" _Michael, no!_ " 

— and see a bolt of flowing blue light streak away from the hind end of the parked car he was tucked up against, piercing into the rift. It was accompanied by a sound not unlike a Jukot 57-L blast pistol on the verge of overload, and its results were immediate and dramatic: the rift groaned, shivered like a wet dog on a cold night, curdled like bad milk and imploded on itself, sending a backblast of raw energy racing back the way the blue bolt had come to slam something against the trunk of the police car hard enough to make it rock on its wheels.

Jack blinked to clear the flash-glow from his eyes, sat up the rest of the way, looked down the car's length and saw… well, something surprising.

And hot. Definitely, undeniably hot, as long as you fancied your men with thin currents of blue energy flowing under their pale-as-cream skin in elegant patterns that melded circuit boards with hieroglyphics — and with one hand, their right in this case, seared down to the bare bones. Other than that it looked human, disarmingly so, like a slender young male composed of fine bones and rangy muscle, with a sculpted face of almost androgynous beauty and short pale hair that gleamed golden in the snowy silence of the night, a few longer strands trailing down the nape of its neck towards its sharply delineated shoulder blades. In the shadow of its lap a pretty penis clearly nestled in a nest of fine pubic hair, although the rest of its body was as smooth as if freshly shaven — and quite frankly, in Jack's estimation, utterly flawless.

It was crouched on its knees against the rear wheel of the police car, stark naked, staring at the remains of its hand as if it had never seen it before: not surprising, considering its condition. But then it looked down, at the rest of itself, and a small startled exclamation burst from its thin lips, terrified and wondering and somehow so utterly _lost_. It stared a second longer, then jerked back and sat down hard on its very fine ass, its feet scrambling as if trying to push it away from what it had just seen. But of course its hand was attached, so all that did was crowd it up against the wheel, while it stared at its hand… and stared… and stared, as the bones flexed, opening and closing spasmotically.

No, not bones — metal. They gleamed in the hazy light of the streetlamps, and instinct had Jack on his feet in two seconds flat, his gun out and levelled at the forehead of the new threat. It didn't seem to notice him, too busy wondering at itself, and in its gleaming black eyes thin circlets of red light shuttered fitfully open and closed.

"No," it whispered at last in a strongly accented voice, "no no _no_ ," and it paid no more attention to Gwen as she rose from where she'd darted at Jack's command. "No, this is — I — this is — can't be —"

Gwen approached it slowly, keeping her hands visible and open, clearly weaponless. "Hey," she said quietly when she'd gotten within three metres of it, and for the first time it looked up, the red markers in its eyes contracting to concentrated irises of crimson. It trembled, a whole-body quiver, and in its other hand, clenched atop its drawn-together thighs, cyan radiance gathered in a muted flare.

Jack's finger tightened on the trigger, but a sharp glance from Gwen made him pause. "Jack, put down the gun."

He scowled at her. "That's not —"

"Look at him." She nodded at the rift invader, who was still gazing at her fixedly. "He's not a threat — he's terrified." 

"And fear makes people dangerous," he countered, keeping his gun trained right where it was.

She let the matter drop, easing herself forward another two metres to sink to one knee beside the newest visitor to Cardiff. "Hello there," she said kindly, and smiled into its fixed gaze. "I'm Gwen. What's your name?"

"I," it said, and its gaze jerked up — over to Jack and his firearm, past him to Tosh, around to scan the overall environment, including the policemen who were getting to their feet and wisely keeping their distance. With every passing second the glaze of its shock was growing less, replaced by a quality of both amazement and calculation, and when its strange eyes returned to Gwen's face its expression was one of determination, its tone matter-of-fact and its accent clearly hailing from the north-eastern seaboard of the USA: "I am the Knight Industries Two Thousand. My serial number is Alpha Delta Two Two Seven Five Two Nine. I am unauthorized to allow access to my central processing unit."

"That's all right," Gwen soothed, the very soul of reasonableness, "nobody's —" 

"Where's Michael?" The red light in its gaze flared a little brighter, and it scanned the area again, determination becoming something much closer to fear. "Where is he? He was shot! I have to — he —"

It tried to pull itself to its feet — and failed miserably, stumbling and falling over like a newborn colt unable to find its legs. On all fours it began to crawl toward the former site of the rift, using its burned limb and grimacing each time the skeletal remnants contacted the snow and the pavement beneath, repeating brokenly the while: "He was — he — he — I — must —"

Owen, who'd stuck his head up from behind the police car while Gwen was introducing herself, observed: "It's a nutter then, is it?"

"No," Tosh said from the ground, and accepted the offer of Jack's free hand to help her to her feet — offered blind, because his gun was still trained on the potential threat. "It's obviously programmed to protect that person… whoever he is."

"And whoever he is," Jack concluded, "he's on the other side of the rift." Unreachable, and possibly lost forever.

Tosh nodded, pocketed her scanner after briefly checking it, and sprinted round to kneel in the robot's path, ducking her head to look into its face and speaking clearly: "Knight Industries Two Thousand, can you hear me?" 

The machine stopped less than a foot away from her. Paused. Raised its head slowly to meet her eyes, and spoke mechanically: "Yes. I can hear you."

Mechanically, yes — but with something more, something deeply un-mechanical. Jack lowered his gun but kept it in hand, and simply watched.

"Tell me," Tosh ordered, "who is Michael?"

"Michael Knight." It seemed held by Tosh's gaze. "The Foundation for Law and Government's front line operative. He's my pilot. My partner." It trembled again and bowed its head, speaking low and rough: "He's… my friend."

"And we'll find him." Tosh reached out and carefully laid a hand on its right shoulder, clearly ready to be burned by the currents of blue energy coursing beneath its skin, outlining the seams of every subliminal joint — but evidently it was cool to the touch, for her grip settled and tightened. "But you have to trust us. You have to come with us and let us help you. All right?"

After a moment it nodded, and cast a wide-eyed glance up into Tosh's eyes. " _Help me,_ " it whispered, a naked plea, then curled in on itself, burying its face in its hands — 

— of which the right hand, a charred wreck only minutes earlier, was already re-sheathing itself in a lattice of wires and fine artificial muscles, slowly rebuilding itself as Jack watched. 

"Owen," he commanded, "go get the SUV," and holstered his gun as he stepped forward with Gwen at his side, relieved that it hadn't come down to a battle between guns and energy blasts after all: in his experience, even robots who couldn't regenerate were damned hard to kill. The sooner they got this thing into the Vault, the better pleased he'd be — and the sooner the city of Cardiff could sleep safe, or at least as safe as ever it did with a Rift embedded in its heart.


	3. Chapter Two: The More Things Change... (T-21.1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anybody isn't familiar with "Knight Rider" and would like to see an episode or two, please hit me up in the comments -- I have a Livestream channel and would be happy to show some. :)

Owen sketched a quick nod and went, leaving Jack to pull out his cellphone and place a call to Ianto. The factotom answered promptly, with his usual dry inflection: " _Good morning, sir. Run into any trouble?_ "

Jack eyed the robot cowering on the ground, unresponsive to Gwen going down on one knee beside it and laying her thinly gloved hand on its left shoulder. "You could say that."

" _Ah. I take it you'll need plenty of hot coffee, then._ "

"Put all three pots on regular rotation. We're bringing in a visitor — might turn out to be a guest, might turn out to be… something else."

" _Very good. Shall I prepare the standard interrogation kit?_ "

"Not this time." Gwen and Tosh had slipped their hands under the android's forearms and between the two of them were coaxing it to sit upright again, resting its buttocks on its heels. The play of synthetic muscles in its bare back, framing the vulnerable line of its spine, was nothing short of inspiring, but — "This one's not organic. Tosh has a protocol already set up to —"

" _— establish detailed remote monitoring of electronics in the Vault,_ " Ianto concluded, and behind his voice Jack could hear keys already clicking. Of course Ianto knew every detail of what everybody was up to at any given time, and damn, relentless efficiency could be so sexy! " _I've got it. Everything will be ready for you when you get back. Are you coming in immediately? Do you need any assistance?_ "

"Yes, and no. It's being cooperative, for the moment. If that changes you'll be the first to know."

" _I'll see you soon, then,_ " and Jack knew he wasn't imagining the warmth behind those words, muted as it was by crisp professionalism: he'd seen a stronger version of it, honest and unshielded, in Ianto's smiling blue eyes while sharing his lover's bed not twenty-four hours ago. It was a constant delight to him, the way that cool reserve came apart under his mouth and his hands again and again, hot around his cock and wet over his fingers, the taste of it salty and savoury…

He let the lusty memory fill him with pleasure for the second it took him to put the phone away, then sidelined it to concentrate on the present. Snow crunched under his boots as he crossed around in front of the trio on the ground, keeping a distance of two metres. The robot was looking at Gwen, who was giving it her best _We're all friends here, aren't we?_ smile and asking it: "Are you cold?"

"I —" It seemed to give the question serious consideration, an expression of awe settling on its face, followed by consternation. "Oh… Oh dear, how strange… Yes, I believe I might be."

Gwen stripped off her three-quarter length leather jacket and draped it over those slim shoulders, wrapping it up as warmly as she could. "There! That's better, isn't it?" 

It looked down, as if considering the overall effect, before raising its shining eyes to her face again, and for the first time a hint of a smile curved one corner of its lips. It was both charmingly idiosyncratic and startling in its sweetness, and Jack found the effect subtly devastating. "Yes. Thank you."

"Come on, let's get you up…"

Jack's mind promptly went about twenty different places, most of them involving warm soft beds and silk sheets, all of them quite dirty. He kept any trace of them well off his face as Gwen and Tosh secured their grips on the android's forearms — the right hand and wrist were rapidly reconstituting themselves, a fine web of "skin" already forming over the underlying structures — and guided it up onto its bare feet. Between them they steadied it when it swayed, then supported it as it started slowly toward the open space beyond the parked car, stumbling badly and scowling down at its traitorous lower limbs — at first. By the time they were two metres beyond the police cars its gait was noticeably improving, and Gwen obviously felt it was balanced enough to leave it entirely to Tosh when she spotted Constable Davidson approaching and had to move to intercept him.

Jack, who'd fallen in behind them at that same distance of two metres, ready to go for his gun if anything changed, strolled a couple of steps closer, the better to listen as Tosh and the robot came to a halt and Tosh queried it: "Have you sustained any other damage?"

"I…" It tilted its head toward her slightly, and Jack could clearly see its frown in profile. A momentary breath of wind stirred the fine strands of long hair that trailed down the nape of its neck from the close-cropped wheat coloured hair at the base of its skull. "I don't think so. This body is — I know this is going to sound crazy, but I'm completely unfamiliar with it. I'm not getting any interrupt prompts consistent with a malfunction, so for the moment I'm going to say, no."

Tosh's smile didn't quite reach her eyes. "That's good!" she said brightly, and patted its upper arm nervously, as if she'd suddenly realized that she was in close physical contact with something capable of firing energy blasts that could close rifts. 

The machine, meanwhile, was craning its neck to take in the snowy deserted street. "And I'm going to take a wild guess and say that this is _not_ California."

"You're only off by about five thousand miles," Jack quipped, automatically speaking in units of measurement it would be likely to understand given where and when it had evidently come from.

It whipped its head around and stared at him. "Five _thousand_? But — that's impossible!" It cocked its head again, the red circlets in its eyes flaring wider, and Jack got the distinct impression that it was turning its gaze inward. "My chronometer says… it says…" They refocussed once more, and now its voice carried both a grudging note of apology and a rising note of anger: "It's offline. But are you seriously trying to tell me that I've somehow been transported five thousand miles in —?" 

Tosh patted its bicep again, and pasted a smile on when it looked down at her sharply. "Best not to think about it too much right now. We'll get you sorted out, don't you worry!"

"Worrying is my _job_ ," the android said almost savagely, as Jack's hand inched toward the holster on his hip. Its gaze darted toward the movement, then rose to Jack's eyes and held them for a long, tense moment. This time its smile was wry. "You think I'm going to attack you, don't you? Well, rest assured that's not going to happen. My dominant program is the protection of human life, _all_ human life. And from the look of things —" The crimson indicators in its eyes flared and shifted as it scanned Jack up and down, then Tosh. "— you both qualify. Unlike those — _things_ Michael and I were chasing, just before…"

The Torchwood SUV, with Owen behind the wheel, had pulled up while he was speaking, and the doctor piled out, taking in the tableau — Tosh holding onto the reforming right arm and not quite daring to make any sudden moves, Jack and the android staring at each other — with a quirk of one eyebrow. Jack acknowledged his arrival with a nod, continuing to hold the robot's gaze, and murmured a command — "Get the hubcap." Owen sketched a mock-salute with his left forefinger to his temple and set off to collect the evidence. 

The android was still studying Jack in return. "Who _are_ you?" it asked at last, and glanced at his left wrist. "That device you're wearing… it's not like any technology I've ever seen before. Not to mention those small computers you're all carrying in your pockets."

This was something Jack had done so many times before that taking a step forward and flashing his most debonaire smile was second nature, even if he still wasn't sure if he was addressing a neutral quantity or a potential enemy. "Captain Jack Harkness," he announced, nodding toward each team member in turn: "And this is Toshiko Sato… that's Gwen Cooper over there, liaisoning with the police… and the fellow grabbing the hubcap is Owen Harper."

" _Doctor_ Owen Harper," Owen groused, trotting back with the circle of gleaming black in one hand, but Jack was too busy dealing with a minor lightning-strike of internal shock to really pay attention: for a fraction of a second there, providing the robot with his long-term alias, he'd felt another name rising to his lips — a name he hadn't used in over two centuries, a name he'd not even offered to all of his past husbands and wives. For an instant, gazing into obsidian mirrors that concealed a mystery whose contours he'd barely begun to decipher, he'd almost surrendered a part of himself that was perhaps the most precious thing he had left. 

And it had come to him not as a calculated ploy, but with the force of instinct. He almost had to close his eyes briefly, to stop the internal sensation of reeling back on his heels.

It helped that the android had turned its keen eyes toward Owen, fixing them on the round piece of metal — if it was metal at all — in the doctor's hands, and a trace of a smile quirked one corner of its mouth again, wistful in a way that went straight to Jack's heart and libido in one swift stroke. "I beg your pardon," it said half-politely, half-firmly, "but that's my hubcap, and it belongs with me…" One elegant dark eyebrow flicked upward ruefully. "… even if I currently have no place to put it."

"Right," Owen drawled with a glower of hostile disbelief, "I give you the hubcap, you use it to decapitate us all. Not bloody —"

Jack gave himself a subliminal shake and got his feet moving, striding around the android's left side toward the SUV, deliberately crossing both their lines of sight and disrupting the glaring match. "Give him the hubcap." 

Owen stared at him like he'd just asked for a grilled stoat on a bun, with hot sauce. "But —" 

Reaching the driver's side door, Jack held up his hand. Owen tossed the keys to him while griping: "Have none of you actually _seen_ the Terminator movies? Giving crazy robots weapons never ends —"

Jack caught the keys neatly. "Give it to him," he repeated, altering his tone just enough to make it an order while levelling an _I'm not kidding here_ look across the SUV's hood. 

Owen scowled more deeply and slid his eyes sideways toward the mechanism, which arched its other eyebrow at him and straightened carefully to its full height for the first time, holding out its left hand. From that simple physical gesture a whole flurry of impressions streamed into Jack's brain, attuned as it was from his days running cons to reading personality from the smallest cues: strength of character, inherent civility, and a streak of irrepressible pride. 

"Fine," Owen grumbled, "but if it ends up slaughtering us all…"

The android accepted the hubcap, handed over with undisguised ill grace, with a little incline of its chin and a smile that suggested — no, positively telegraphed — that it considered itself at least a cut or two above the man who'd just overtly disrespected it. "Thank you," it stated just punctiliously enough to be cutting, and Jack added _sly_ to the list of characteristics, then _courtly_ when Gwen walked back in and it bowed its head to her in a more genuinely gracious manner. "And thank you very kindly for the coat. The top half of this body is warmer now, at least." 

Jack could tell that Gwen's smile was genuine: she'd always had a bit of an adorable soft spot for sincerely offered expressions of gratitude. "Let's get you into the car, then," she said, "and turn the heat on."

"Thank you, I think —" It turned toward the SUV and promptly froze, its ebony eyes going wide. "I… I'm sorry, I've never…"

"Never ridden in a car?" Gwen prompted.

"I always _was_ the car," it murmured, and turned a pleading gaze on her. "I — I have no idea how to — well, how to get in."

"Here," Tosh interjected, stepping smoothly into her role as handler of new technologies. She re-established her hold on its right elbow and guided it around the vehicle, speaking clearly and firmly: "It's easy. I'll get the door… Gwen?"

Jack slid in behind the wheel and started the engine, turning the heat up to full: Gwen in particular was looking distinctly frosty around the edges. The android slipped into the front passenger seat, managed to get the seatbelt on with Gwen's help, then promptly laid the hubcap high up on its lap — a genuine shame from Jack's point of view in the driver's seat, since it eclipsed a very fine view, as well as depriving Jack of any possible opportunity to slide his left hand over while the rest were arguing over their arrangement in the back seat: he wanted to stroke that tender pink head like a kitten, just to see if it was purely cosmetic or actually (hopefully) functional. In the confines of the vehicle he could detect the machine's scent as the small space heated up: artificial but clean, with a trace of something closer to organic, definitely in pheromonal territory. It tickled at Jack's nose and piqued his curiosity, but wasn't strong enough to amount to compulsion — 

— not that this creature needed any help in that department. As they pulled away from Womanby Street Jack snuck a sidelong glance at its profile while it gazed keenly out the window at the passing urban landscape: it was an exquisite thing no matter which way you looked at it, meticulously crafted, without a single seam or evident flaw in its nakedness. The only hint that it wasn't natural lay in the way the lines of blue energy had contoured around its joints, as if it there were hinges beneath its skin — but organic beings had hinges too, only designed by evolution rather than by clever engineers, and the flow of power under its skin had now faded to the occasional dim symmetrical flare along its arms or its legs. 

Owen, meanwhile, was continuing to opine from the starboard end of the back seat: "You've all got the inherent self-preservation of lemmings, you know that, don't you? It'd almost serve you right if the damned thing turned around and fried you with that energy ray it's carrying, or took the wheel and crashed us all into the nearest building."

"Giving it ideas won't help," Gwen pointed out from her seat at port. 

Jack glanced up into the rearview mirror, caught Tosh's wide bright eyes, and smiled reassuringly before turning his attention to their passenger, which was leaning to its left to direct its gaze as far up the passing buildings as it could. The fingertips of its right hand, now fully repaired, were lightly pressed to the glass, as delicate and as wistful as a child's. "How's that sit with you?" he asked. "Being called 'it', I mean."

"Hm?" The patterns in its eyes were reflected in the shadowed window, cycling in and out as it turned to look at Jack blankly. "I don't understand."

Jack spoke slowly and clearly. "I mean, what's your preferred gender?"

Owen's eyeroll was practically audible, but the android only blinked before replying: "Oh, that. I was designed with a male personality matrix and I've always been addressed in those terms, so I suppose that will serve." 

Jack didn't quite manage not to look down at its — his — lap, nor to conceal his smirk. "In case you haven't noticed, you've got a lot more claim to being male than just your personality." This time he let his eyes openly linger on a point below the curve of the hubcap. "I'd say about six or seven inches worth of claim — that's just a ballpark, but I'd be happy to verify the —"

"Jack," Gwen warned, and he glanced back to catch the flash of rebuke in her lovely eyes: _Sure, I told you not to shoot him and I gave him my own coat to keep him warm, but he's still a rift invader and we're not sure what's up with him yet. For God's sake, don't flirt with aliens we know nothing about!_

"Yes," the android said slowly. It didn't appear to have noticed Jack's approving once-over. It was still gazing at his face. "Yes… I suppose you're right. I…" It turned back toward the window, seeming to grow smaller under the weight of Gwen's coat as its right hand dropping into its lap to rest atop the hubcap, as fragile as a broken bird for all its steel-boned power. "I'll need to… process…"

"Marvellous," Owen drawled, "you've broken it already," but Tosh, who was consulting her scanner while pointing it at the android, ignored him, and Gwen, who knew better than to rise to Owen's bait, kept her mouth shut. And Jack, who knew full well that Gwen was right and that even being profoundly sexy wasn't enough to spare a traveller the full experience of interrogation, let the subject drop.

He did reach out though, once and quickly, to lay his left hand on the robot's right knee and give it a brief squeeze. It was pleasantly cool to the touch, and at the pressure of his hand faint blue radiance flared and flowed from the point of contact. The fleeting glance and slight smile of apparent gratitude he received in return didn't make him feel the least bit better about what was to come. 


	4. Chapter Three: Questions and Answers 1 (T-18.7)

Jack, minus his greatcoat and sporting rolled-up shirt sleeves and cradling his third cup of coffee in both hands, settled his left hip on Tosh's current desk in the heart of the Hub before querying: "So _, are_ we dealing with a machine?" 

Tosh nodded, calling up several sets of scan results from her past couple of hours remote monitoring one particular cell in the Vault. "No trace whatsoever of organics. It's definitely a robot, but created using technology far in advance of what twentieth century humanity is capable of. In fact, in some ways it outstrips anything else we've currently got here in Torchwood." She didn't acknowledge Jack's skeptical grimace, and a few swift taps on her keyboard maximized the CGI image of something that looked like a cross between a computer chip and a body louse. "Take its regenerative ability, for example — microscopic nanites, capable of scavenging its immediate environment for raw materials and recreating whatever parts of it have been damaged or destroyed. It's actually sixty-two percent nanites by volume."

Jack considered that, taking a long sip of his coffee — say what you will about Ianto, he was a sheer wizard when it came to caffeine — and pondering the implications. "How much damage can he take and still reconstruct himself?"

A faint scowl of frustration surfaced, but she picked up the verbal cue and corrected herself: "I can't tell for certain because some element in his physical composition is interfering with my scans, but theoretically, if the memory of his construction is stored holographically? He could regenerate himself from the smallest particle of debris, providing that particle contained at least two intact nanites."

Which made things quite a bit worse from a practical what-do-we-do-if-he's-hostile point of view… and also prompted a line of thought that threatened to open up into reaches that Jack really didn't want to touch. He weighed the next words carefully on his tongue: "Are you saying he's… immortal?"

"More so than most robots, yes." She opened up more windows, featuring the hubcap and an analysis of the dynamics of the rift the car had crashed out of. "Here's the weird bit: the hubcap from the car definitely reads as the late nineteen eighties, but the body we've got down in the Vault dates from at least two hundred and fifty years later." She cued the analysis to run in fast forward, and Jack watched the automobile fly through the incursion, strike the ground, start to roll again — and collide with another incursion which flashed into and out of existence so quickly he almost missed it. Tosh obligingly rewound and replayed in slow motion, explaining as the scene unfolded: "The car struck a secondary rift one point two seconds after exiting the main rift, after its hubcap came loose, and when it came out the other side, back into our point in the time-space continuum, the artificial intelligence inhabiting it had been transferred into the android body from its own future."

"Intersecting time slices," Jack murmured, his mind racing over a range of possibilities running from dangerous to potentially apocalyptic. "That means he's an unstable point in space-time, and a disaster just waiting to —"

But Tosh was shaking her head. "That's just it — he's not. He's as stable as any of us."

He blinked down at her for a second. "That's impossible."

"You'd think so, when a mind from the past gets overlaid onto a body from the future. But science doesn't lie." She glanced at the feed of the robot pacing its cell. "Even if the data flies in the face of commonly accepted knowledge. It may have something to do with him not being from around here: he's not just displaced in time, he came from an alternate dimension."

Jack nodded decisively. "That would explain why trying to track down the Foundation and the operative he mentioned turned up nothing. How far out of phase is it?"

"Not far." She pulled up more readings, a red graph oscillating narrowly around the green flows that indicated Torchwood's slice of the cosmos. "Phase variance is at point zero two four six percent. He'd recognize most aspects of our reality, but some of the details will be off from what he's used to."

He stared at the data without really seeing it, that one dangerous word resonating in his mind: _immortal_. It provoked a steadily growing unease, but he took the unexpected emotional reaction firmly in mental hand and set it to one side. There'd be time for that kind of speculation later. Right now…  "What about the woman we saw through the rift? Was she from the same dimension?"

"The one he almost ran down? I'm still working on that analysis. Getting accurate readings through a rift —"

"Is tricky, yeah." He drank a little more coffee. "Keep on it. Back to the android's scans — what's messing them up, exactly?"

She input more commands, glanced over the full-body image that came up with shadowy internal structures nestled in and around the android's human-shaped internal framework, and replied matter-of-factly: "It's hard to tell, because I can't get a good look in the first place. It might be something in the alloy of his skeleton, or it might be an active shield generated by his security systems. I can tell that he's entirely mechanical, that he runs on some form of cold fusion — there, see the engines in his chest? — and I suspect that his memory and processing functions are indeed stored holographically rather than in a central 'brain', but other than that? I'd have to get a lot closer, and he would have to cooperate with what I was doing."

Jack's gaze settled on one of the smaller windows: real-time security cam footage of the android in its cell, pacing around the perimeter of the small space allotted to it with measured strides, hands clasped behind its back, head turning smoothly in a slow steady scanning movement — and completely naked, the jumpsuit and shoes Ianto had put on the cell's bunk still neatly folded where the factotum had put them prior to their prisoner's arrival. "Have you tried accessing his memory by remote?"

This time she threw up her hands in rare exasperation. "It's no good — he's resisted every attempt to interface, and every time I get an algorithm assembled to circumvent his firewall, he just rewrites it." She went at the keyboard again, whipping code together and sending it off with a keystroke, only to see it minimize toward the symbol indicating an alien system, turn bright red before it got there, and pop back up garbled. "See? That's the downside to dealing with an A.I. as opposed to your garden variety computer system: they're usually smart enough to come up with tricks to counter any attempt to do something they don't like."

Jack nodded, scanning the wrecked code: the robot had torn it to shreds, but the way the parts were rearranged and assembled… "That segment there." He pointed. "That looks like one of the key sequences —"

"— to activate a counter-scan on our own systems, yes." A hint of a smile leavened her expression of frustration, the gleam of lively interest that Jack had seen before in so many scientists faced with some wonderful new piece of technology. "I think it's meant to be some sort of joke, like he's telling us that he could turn the process against us if he wanted to." 

"A joke — or a threat." His gaze returned to the security cam feed, where the android had paused and turned its face toward the computer screen mounted on the Vault wall. Its pitch-black eyes were narrowed, its slightly raised chin telegraphing pride and defiance. There was something entirely too familiar about that posture for Jack's liking — the memory of pathetic and deadly Lisa, partially converted to a Cyberwoman, was still fresh enough to flare red-hot. "Tell me you've beefed up system security."

"I started working on it as soon as I realized he was throwing our own code back at us," Tosh stated. "He hasn't tried to actively hack us — yet. But if he does, he won't get very far."

"Make that 'nowhere'," Jack ordered, refocussing his attention when he caught sight of Gwen emerging from the staff sleeping area looking both warmer and more rested. She'd tried to tell him she was fit to conduct the interrogation immediately, but he'd learned to read her well enough in the past two years that she couldn't fool him with faked liveliness anymore: he'd insisted she take a long nap, and the impression he was getting from her expression and deportment now was far more satisfactory. 

"You ready?" he asked her as she came up the walkway toward his position.

"Coffee," she said, holding out her hand. He passed over his mug without comment, watching in amusement as she drained the rest of it at one pull. "Hf," she shuddered retroactively at the taste of the pitch-black brew, then set the cup down on the desk. "Yeah, okay. Good to go."

He turned briefly to Tosh. "Let me know if our guest tries sticking his fingers anywhere they don't belong," and turned away again before she had time to nod her acknowledgement, gallantly gesturing Gwen toward the doorway leading down to the Vault. "After you."

"Why, thank you, kind sir," she smiled back, and proceeded ahead of him. He certainly didn't mind the view, not when she wore what were undeniably his favourite set of tight stone-washed blue jeans. "Anything new to report?"

"He hasn't tried to blast his way out, and he doesn't seem to know what clothes are for." He flashed an impish grin at her when she glanced back with a skeptical tilt of her eyebrows. "Not that I'm complaining. Far from it, in fact! I've gotta admit, they certainly do build 'em gorgeous in the twenty-third century…"

"You're not seriously thinking of —" She stopped herself with a shake of her head, which made Jack laugh delightedly.

"You know me better than that!" 

"I certainly do," she murmured, "God help me," and preceded him down the stairs, still shaking her head ruefully, while he followed close on her heels, still wearing an irrepressible smirk…


	5. Chapter Four: Questions and Answers 2 (T-18.5)

… a smirk that faded as Gwen opened the door leading into the Vault, instantly replaced by an expression of stern determination. They'd performed enough interrogations of rift travellers that they had their roles down pat, and Bad Cop was Jack's job in this case. He couldn't afford to be anything less than absolutely convincing, which wasn't hard considering what he'd just learned about the machine in question.

Appreciating a fine body and an appealing personality was one thing, but when that body and personality posed a threat to his team and to the planet he'd taken under his wing…

It would be a pity to demolish the pretty creature. He wouldn't enjoy it. But he'd do it if he had to, without a second's hesitation.

The android ceased its pacing — Jack couldn't afford to think of it as _he_ , as something that carried warmth and charm and the weight of a fully formed personality, not now — and turned on its heel to face them as they approached, hands still tightly clasped behind its back, its face set in hard lines of its own. "Well, it's about time!" it snapped. "I'd appreciate it if you'd tell your people to stop trying to access my program. It's most annoying, not to mention that the sheer discourtesy of it borders on demeaning."

Jack stepped right up to the glass, fixing it with an unblinking gaze. "Are you going to let them in voluntarily?"

Which the robot met squarely from less than six inches away. "Of course not."

"Then we've got to keep on trying," Gwen said from a couple of feet behind Jack's right shoulder, in a tone almost of apology.

The android shifted its gaze briefly to her face, then back to Jack's, the stiff line of its slim shoulders unbending even as it inclined its chin in a tiny gesture of conciliation. "If you'll tell me what you're looking for, I might be able to help. No promises, of course."

"We're trying to figure out how you got here," Jack stated, openly accusatory.

Gwen completed the point more diplomatically: "And more importantly, why."

Again it glanced between them, and then it actually sighed, ducking its chin and casting its gaze downward. It's Boston accent was softer this time: "Believe me, I wish I knew. It's rather dreadful, starting out the day as yourself and ending up as a stranger… in body, anyway."

 _Damn it to the Nine Hells of Katarr!_ Jack thought savagely as something magnetic pulled at his heart. _Is this one of its forms of attack — to appeal to the sympathies and desires of organic beings, until it's in a position to strike?_ Aloud he said: "And you're telling us that you don't recognize this body you're in right now."

"No!" It's gaze flashed back up, communicating a sudden depth of dismay and shame. "I'm not — humanoid! I've got four wheels, and a scanner, and an engine — I'm sleek and black and dashing, not… this!" It hesitated a half-second, staring at Jack as if pleading for an answer, then turned away, taking a compulsive step before realizing it couldn't go much further in the tiny cell. It's head came up, but it remained facing the far wall, now sounding scathingly bitter: "This body is both ridiculous and useless! My speed, my turbo boost abilities, my molecular bonded shell — gone, all gone! What earthly use am I to anybody now?"

"I don't know," Jack remarked, "I wouldn't mind taking you for a spin…" It just came out, and when the android turned on its heel again to stare at him with eyes opened wide he felt the artificial construct of _it_ shatter and fall at their feet in shards beyond repair. 

"I beg your pardon?" the robot asked in a tone of outright disbelief bordering on outrage, the delicate rings of red in his ebony sclera expanding and contracting swiftly.

Jack started to open his mouth again, not knowing what would emerge this time, but Gwen got there first. "You said you had a pilot —"

He turned his attention to her, eyes now narrowing. "I _have_ a pilot." 

"And what does he call you?" Out of the corner of his eye, Jack caught her friendly smile and heard the ripple of a laugh in her voice. "I mean, _the Knight Industries Two Thousand'_ s a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?" 

"He calls me KITT," the android said after a long moment of consideration and a wary tilt of his head.

"Well, KITT," Gwen said reasonably, "why don't you get dressed, and then we'll take you upstairs for a few tests —"

"Tests?" He sounded like somebody had just poked him in the ribs with something sharp. "I don't have time for this! Michael is in danger! I have to get —"

Jack overrode him ruthlessly. "You're not going anywhere until we can make sure you're not a threat." 

"A threat?" His hands dropped to his sides as he stared, manifestly disbelieving. "I was created to protect and preserve human life!" A spike of laughter, completely unamused, peaked in his voice. "What on Earth would possibly make you think that I'd be a danger to anybody?" 

That part wasn't hard: Jack knew what he'd seen. "You clipped that girl pretty good when she got in your way." 

"Out on the tarmac, just before I — ended up here? She was the one who was a threat!" KITT countered. "The impact was precisely calculated — she sustained no lasting damage." 

"And what if one day you miscalculate?" Jack demanded.

"Impossible," KITT insisted. "My algorithms are flawless."

"Well," Gwen said a little more forcefully, "we've got someone who can tell us whether or not that's true."

KITT shook his head, closing his eyes as if praying for strength — or perhaps restraint. "Why do you insist on keeping me here, when —"

Jack spotted the weakness and made a dominance play again: "If you want out, tell us who you are."

"I've told you who I am," the android cried, lines of arcane blue power awakening and flowing under his skin in response to his heightened emotional state, running from the planes of his chest through his hips and shoulders, down to trace the artificial bones of his hands and feet. "Repeatedly!" He stepped up to the glass again, placed both palms flat against it — they glowed, but did not burn — and fixed Jack with a stare that managed to combine anger and pleading with utter sincerity. "I am the Knight Industries Two Thousand computer, I control the Knight Two Thousand robotic automobile, and I'm the partner of Michael Knight, who is a front line operative of the Foundation for Law and Government!"

Something in Jack's solar plexus twisted, as if a hook had been fixed into it and was pulling him forward. It was so powerful that for an instant the possibility of mind control seemed highly likely, but his voice emerged as steady as ever: "Which doesn't show up in any information search."

"The Knight Two Thousand program is… well, let's call it clandestine project." He was scanning Jack's face as if the key to his cell lay somewhere within it. "But the Foundation is a public organization — if you look for it, you'll find it!"

"We've tried, and we didn't." He yielded to the pull, took a half-step closer so his breath fogged on the glass, so close he could smell the pale skin arranged so openly less than a forearm's-length away. "It doesn't exist — not in this dimension, anyway. So why don't you tell us who you really are?"

"This _dimension_? Are you actually suggesting that —?" He closed his mouth abruptly, looked down at the length of his own naked body, and seemed to reconsider his statement of disbelief. When his gaze rose to Jack's face again the next words to emerge were quiet and full of steel: "I'm not designed to lie, Captain Harkness — my primary function is to protect my pilot. Please, I have to find him — the last time I saw him, he was in terrific danger! He needs me…" 

Jack looked down and up the length of that vulnerable body as well, and when he met those gleaming eyes again he permitted himself to speak a shade less harshly. "And our primary function is to protect the planet from any threat that comes through the Rift." He slid a sidelong glance at Gwen, whose level gaze offered support. "An android capable of shooting energy bolts that can close dimensional portals isn't something I intend to let run loose."

For a long moment KITT stared back at him, locked in a battle of wills. When he let his hands fall from the glass and took a half-step back, Jack knew who had won. He was actually breathing more deeply, his finely sculpted chest rising and falling as if in distress. "Will you at least tell me where I am?"

Gwen took a step forward, intruding on the dynamic between them for the first time. "What year do you think it is?" 

KITT looked at her with a little frown of consternation. "It's August twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-seven."

Jack couldn't stop his mouth from twitching in grim amusement. "This time you're only off by a little over thirty years."

Slowly KITT's gaze turned to him, and the android's tone suggested that it was well aware it might not like the answer to its next question. "What do you mean?" 

Jack folded his arms, brushing the glass in the process, and shrugged. "Granted, it's a bit better than five thousand miles… or a lot worse, depending on your perspective."

"The year is two thousand and eight," Gwen stated, and then, after a moment's pause, more quietly: "I'm sorry."

KITT stared at her as if she'd just pronounced a death sentence. Jack could imagine what was going through his mind: thoughts of his wounded pilot and far, far too much time lost. "No! No, that's…"

Gwen pulled out her cellphone, tapped in a couple of commands, and stepped up to the plexiglass at Jack's right side, holding it up so KITT could see. "Look… there's the date." She let him take it in for a moment before gently affirming: "We're telling you the truth."

KITT stared at the screen's display for two human heartbeats, then raised his own left hand again and laid it flat to the glass, over one of the ventilation holes. He bowed his head, the red circlets in his eyes beginning to cycle larger and faster as more blue energy flowed in thin lines down his arm, culminating in a glowing physical tendril which extruded swiftly from his palm, whipped across the foot and a half of intervening space, and slotted its tip into the data port of Gwen's phone. The phone emitted a strangled beep, as if protesting the unwanted invasion.

Jack scowled, glancing between KITT and the phone. "What's he doing?"

Gwen tried to pull the phone back, but the tendril followed, and information began to flash across its screen: her phone contact list, personal photographs, a blur of pages off the Internet. "I don't know."

"Data…" KITT was staring into the middle distance, apparently entranced. "So much data… so many computers, all interconnected… so many voice transmissions… video, audio… a global positioning system… and this place — I'm in Cardiff, Wales..." He blinked and raised his head again, gazing at Gwen, then at Jack. He looked mildly stunned. "You _are_ telling the truth — or else you've set up a fake set of systems on a scale that defies belief. But — how? How did I get here?"

He sounded, and looked, so bewildered — so human — that something in Jack's chest shifted more dramatically, the clench of oppositional tension softening toward something else. Something nobody could afford at the moment, but he let some of that new compassion leak through into his voice and his expression: "We don't know — yet. But we can find out, if you come with us and you cooperate with our diagnostics."

He gazed back as if he longed to seize that option. Then he shook his head decisively; the tendril disengaged from Gwen's phone and flowed back into his hand, which he removed from the glass before taking a long step back, wariness in every line of his body. "I can't. I'm not authorized."

Jack shook his head and delivered the ultimatum: "Then you'll be staying down here until you decide you can trust us." He nodded curtly to his second in command and unfolded his arms, turning to walk away. "For the sake of your pilot, I hope you —"

"Keep me here, then, if you feel you must." The quiet urgency in the android's tone stopped him in his tracks. He turned, reluctantly, to meet those unblinking eyes once more as KITT stepped up to the glass, touching the fingers of his left hand to it as if he could breach it with sheer gentleness.  "I'm used to being parked and abandoned. But Michael…" Jack had seen adoration and devotion far too many times in his long life not to recognize it now, filling those ebony eyes with sublime light and that crisp tenor with urgent conviction. "You talk about these 'rifts' as if you know something about them. Please — if you can open one, and get to him… find him, and help him. I don't care what you do to me. He's the only thing that matters."

Far too often — and not nearly enough. Love so pure was a rare and precious thing in a universe full of darkness.

And in this case, he'd seen it one time too many. Sympathy and duty warred briefly within him: part of him, the part that knew what it was to cherish another person more than life itself, would have flung the cell door open if it had been within his power… 

… but duty and practicality had much greater firepower at their command. KITT's temporal stability could lapse at any moment. Michael Knight was locked in another dimension. And a robot that packed built-in weaponry and could regenerate itself endlessly couldn't be let loose on the planet, ever. 

 _He could blast his way free._ The question twisted in his mind: _Why doesn't he blast his way free?_ The answer immediately followed: _Because he'd have to get through us, and he's programmed to preserve human life. He can't risk causing us harm. He has no choice but to wait until we let him go…_

"Get dressed." He kept the words tight, plates of armour wrapped none-too-securely around his heart. "And when you change your mind…" He nodded toward the security cam mounted in the far corner. "Let us know."

He was halfway up the stairs before Gwen spoke up from behind him: "Jack…?"

"He doesn't know." Every instinct concurred: "He can't tell us anything."

Even her footfalls managed to sound thoughtful. "So what do we do now?"

For an instant Jack wished that sympathy was a luxury he could afford. "Unless he decides to cooperate, we keep him here indefinitely — or, if he refuses to stay in confinement, we find some way to destroy him."

He was not entirely surprised to find that conclusion something of a relief.


	6. Chapter Five: Sacred and Profane (T-17.6)

Fifteen minutes later, Jack had accomplished three things: snagged a fresh cup of hot coffee from Ianto's miraculous there-exactly-when-you-need-it silver tray, strong-armed Gwen into going home and crawling into bed with her fiancé for a few hours of much-needed sleep, and finished the debrief with Tosh, who turned out to have several more pieces of interesting information in hand. With typical inventiveness, she'd even proposed a possible way to shut their newest guest down with a modified process damping field that could be broadcast through the Vault's existing EMP system. Jack had ordered her to proceed with set-up, because although the CCTV showed that KITT had managed, after several false starts, to figure out how to slip into the beige jumpsuit and shoes, he didn't look happy about it in the least… and the way he was standing dead centre in his cell — facing the wall-mounted computer screen, eyes closed, hands clasped behind his back in a pose of military severity — strongly suggested that even if he wasn't actively smashing his way out of captivity, he was still up to something less benign than a bit of relaxing meditation.

Tosh, bright-eyed and eager to take on the challenge, dived into the code. Owen, bleary-eyed and grumbling about dawn being the most depressing time of the fucking day, shrugged into his leather jacket and departed shortly thereafter, acknowledging Jack's shouted directive to be back by two o'clock with an ill-tempered twitch of his chin in passing. Which left Jack and Ianto, and all it took was one glance between them behind Tosh's back to communicate everything that needed to be said…

They'd been lovers for a little less than two years, and Jack was confident that they understood each other perfectly: a solid boss/employee relationship, excellent sex, and few entanglements in the twenty-first century's emotional sense. Panting and grinding together against the wall in a lower level storeroom, drinking each other's moans with hungry shameless mouths, they burned off a lot of tension, painted each other's bared bellies white, licked away the evidence and emerged back onto the upper level looking like butter wouldn't melt between them — not that Tosh particularly noticed, engrossed as she was in solving the problem she'd set herself. 

Jack, still glowing, regarded her affectionately for a moment before turning to Ianto. "Think the two of you can hold the fort while I sneak in a couple of hours?"

The factotum nodded, his pale eyes bright and a flush lingering on his cheeks. "Of course, sir. We'll alert you if anything changes."

Jack smiled more widely, sated and self-satisfied and feeling even fonder than usual of everybody on his team. He sauntered into his office, popped open the manhole cover in the floor, and lowered himself inside to the narrow mattress where he spent most of his dreaming time: he had a permanent suite in The Cardiff Apartment on Queen Street, but almost never used it unless he needed a readily available place to take a bedmate of the hour. He didn't feel comfortable in its neat anonymous rooms. The Hub, after all, was his true home, and Torchwood his only family.

Sleep came swiftly this time. Stretched out on his back in the dimly blue-lit space, eyes drifting closed and body releasing every trace of physical tension, he reflected idly that he's been exceptionally fortunate to find Ianto on this precious but inhibited planet: attractive, intelligent, useful and handy, with a quality of reserve in delicious contrast to the passion he was capable of under the right circumstances. And above all, accepting of Jack's fifty-first century proclivities when it came to sexuality — Jack had never tried to lie about wanting to screw anything with a willing hole, and Ianto, if he had a problem with that, had never said a word about it. 

Speaking of which… Jack smiled in the darkness, eyes darting briefly behind their peacefully closed lids as a tableau composed itself in his mind. The android he'd just picked up appealed to a different set of tastes — more androgynous face, a slimmer male build, fire and ice shining in its gaze… KITT managed to look good even in an ugly anonymous jumpsuit, but Jack knew he would look far better sprawled supine in the middle of a wide soft bed, his short golden hair in disarray and his whole body bare to reveal every current of energy under his skin… maybe wearing some light bondage gear, tied beautifully open so Jack could trace every fluctuating pattern with his tongue… whimpering and twisting against his restraints, trying not to beg while Jack slowly, thoroughly, powerfully awakened functions he didn't even know he had — stroking and probing and licking, inner thighs and balls and smooth perineum, working his way to the core of him…

He was a lovely seven inches after all, slender and hard and finely embellished with circuit traces in bright cyan. Jack knew he was aching. Didn't stop him running his mouth, though. 

 _What… what do you think you're…?_ Jack could hear the words clearly in imagination, low and roughened and wondering and scandalized, as he squirmed on Jack's tongue. _Captain, **please** —_  

Jack slid back up that long pale body, so artfully adorned with surges of light, and stroked a gentling hand down its taut side from nipple to thigh. He settled his hips, slow thrusts of cock against cock a light coaxing caress, and kissed the breathlessly parted lips before whispering against them: _Easy, sweetheart… relax. Don't fight it. It'll be so good… I'll take care of you, you have my word. Just trust me… all right?_  

A pause while half-hooded black eyes gazed up into his face, hesitant but yielding — no, this was not surrender. Not from one so proud. He could have torn the ropes from their moorings with a single flex of his artificial limbs, but he lay where Jack had placed him, so cool and pliant under Jack's warmer weight even as he murmured, silky and skeptical: _And why should I? I know what your vow is worth —_

— and the two words that passed his lips next, four syllables secret and sacred and profane, jolted Jack out of the sensual heat of fantasy like a crash of icy water, pushing him wide awake and half-upright with a burning gasp in his throat and his heart pounding in his chest. He stared into the shallow night beneath the ground, reality flooding in on him like —

No! It wasn't reality. It was a lie, a spasm of emotional indigestion. It was his mind playing tricks on him, faltering under the weight of well over a century without… 

The last time that name had been spoken, he'd bowed his head over the pale bloodless face of his wife's corpse and wept until the whole world was drenched black and desolate with grief. 

The last time that name had been spoken, he'd howled to the impassive sky and begged for death that never came.

He forced himself to lie back down and close his eyes, calling upon the calming exercises of Je To Kol, but it was far longer before he was able to draw an easy breath and longer yet before sleep came creeping back to shroud his racing mind in merciful silence, save for a single word that refused to be erased:

_Immortal…_


	7. Chapter Six: "Don't Gimme No Lines..." (T-11.2)

When he came back up the ladder into his office shortly after 1:30 p.m., Ianto was just entering with a tray bearing a warmed plate of hot buttered toast and a carafe full of fresh coffee. One of these days, Jack was going to figure out how he always just _knew_ when to show up. But not today.

"Did you sleep well?" Ianto queried while pouring the coffee. Jack, already two big bites into his first slice of toast, debated giving the honest answer — _Well, yes, except for the delicious sexual fantasy that turned into a nightmare about my Name Indelible_ — for about as long as it took to swallow.

"Wonderfully," he cheerfully affirmed instead. "Better than I have in weeks, as a matter of fact."

The glance Ianto gave him from under slightly raised eyebrows suggested that the line had not been bought, but rather than inquiring any further he elected to tip three teaspoons of sugar into Jack's coffee — his first cup of the day was always diabetes-inducing — and hand it across the desk to him. "Glad to hear it," was his only response.

Jack was concentrating on being relieved to the extent that he'd already reached into the drawer that normally held his log journal before remembering: "Damn, I left it over on the rosewood shelf  while looking up a reference — would you mind…?"

"Not at all." Ianto didn't even have to ask what he meant, just crossed the room and retrieved the brown leather-bound book and brought it back with his usual quiet efficiency, holding it out without further comment. Jack accepted it with a smile of thanks, pushed the plate of toast aside to make room for it, opened it up, and reached for a handy pen to start making notes on the most recent —

Ianto cleared his throat. Not loudly, but pointedly, and that was enough to make Jack look up quickly. His assistant looked almost… embarrassed? Maybe not quite, but definitely uncomfortable.

Which made Jack frown fractionally. "Something wrong?"

And damned if Ianto didn't glance to his left, then his right, like a man afraid that he would be overheard. "The android," he said at last, finally levelling a determined gaze at Jack's face. 

After a beat, Jack pressed: "What about him?"

" _It_ ," Ianto stressed, "hasn't been deactivated yet. Has it?"

A flare of irritation awoke in Jack's chest — the memory those synthetic lips, speaking his Name Indelible, was a powerful thing even if it had only been a fevered imagining. "No, and he won't be unless we have to." 

"But standard safety protocols dictate that —"

"Standard safety protocols apply to aliens and hostiles, not to artificial intelligences designed by our own species. Especially ones who were encoded to protect human life, and who haven't shown any signs of aggression toward us."

"I'd heard it isn't from our dimension."

"Has Tosh been telling tales out of school?" But he wasn't really angry: the lateral flow of information assured him that his team was functioning in effective and efficient harmony. 

Ianto didn't answer the question directly. "She said it's also existing in two timelines simultaneously."

"Yep."

"Shouldn't that create a temporal paradox?"

"Not in this case." There was no point in trying to dance around the issue: Ianto had ways of finding out anything he wanted, or needed, to know. That he'd come to Jack first proved a trust that Jack wasn't willing to abuse or dismiss. "He's crawling with Rift energy, but his chronodex profile is as stable as — well, as yours is, anyway. His mind is from an alternate version of nineteen eighty-seven, and his body is from the twenty-third century in the same dimension. And he's trapped somewhere in between. Even if we could find a way back to his home dimension, any attempt to return him to his original timelines at this stage would probably tear him to pieces."

"Would that be a bad thing? I mean… we've all seen how the 'intelligent robot' thing tends to work out." His eyes, usually clear, were briefly clouded with terrible memories of whole-hearted love corrupted to soul-destroying horror. "Which is to say, not well."

Jack started to pick up a slice of toast, thought better of it, and dropped it on the plate again, leaning back in his chair and interlocking his hands just below his chin. "If he was what he claims to be, it would be pretty irresponsible of his original creators to put a homicidal mind inside four thousand-odd pounds of indestructible metal."

"Really?" Ianto nearly winced in disbelief. "We've seen people of various species do things far more stupid than that on a regular basis. There's absolutely no guarantee that it's non-hostile, much less safe." 

Jack nodded. "Right." Because it was a valid point. Only a fool would try to deny it.

"The only sure thing to do is to destroy it."

That point, however — _that_ he would debate to the death. Again. "Not until we find out what brought him here, and why. Cross-dimensional transfers are a lot rarer than cross-temporal ones, at least around here, and if somebody sent him all this way I'd like to know the reason."

Another glance away. "Are you sure you're not…" A shrug. "No, of course not."

Finally, the heart of the matter — or one of them, at any rate. Jack sat up straighter and unlaced his fingers, curving the fingers of his right hand under his chin, locking his left hand onto the arm of the chair. "Am I sure I'm not… what?"

This time his gaze was direct and no-nonsense. "You fancy it."

Jack offered his best flirty grin, hot and incredulous. "What, you're telling me the whole stark naked look doesn't work for him? Seriously?"

Ianto grimaced, half-turning away with barely restrained nervous energy before turning back in deadly earnest: "It's a machine, Jack."

"Yeah," Jack responded lightly because if he didn't make a joke of this he'd probably say something he regretted, "a sexy sexy machine with a killer smile and a body that just won't quit… or at least, I'm hoping it won't, not before I —"

"You really will shag anything, won't you?" Ianto accused.

He flashed a wider grin and tipped a saucy wink. "It's worked out pretty well for me so far."

Ianto cast a small glance toward the ceiling: _Lord, give me strength!_ "If it were a Dalek or a Cyberman, you wouldn't hesitate a second!"

"A Dalek or a Cyberman would have tried to kill us as soon as look at us," Jack countered, still with a hint of a smile. "He hasn't done anything aggressive so far."

"I don't know, he looked pretty damned angry to me a few hours ago."

Jack's smile faded, because even though his Name Indelible was a thing unshared his heart remained somehow convinced that it had already been spoken — and he had to offer his best defence of the speaker.  "Angry and dangerous are two different things. The last thing he saw was his pilot getting shot, and he was running to save him when he got catapulted through a rift. All he wants to do is get free and find Michael Knight, and we're keeping him locked up when he thinks every second might count. I'd say he's entitled to be a little bit pissed off."

"But you're not going to let it go — are you?" 

Was he labouring under the lingering influence of a dream? Yes. Was he utterly divorced from reality? Hell, no! "I can't," he responded at once. "Not until we figure out how he got here, and why."

"But you want to." It was a clear accusation.

 _Are you jealous?_ The words rose sharp and bitter on Jack's tongue. _Jealous of someone I've barely even touched, someone who isn't even a member of your precious human race?_ He swallowed them and tried a tack somewhat less likely to provoke an explosion. "You didn't see his face. You didn't look into his eyes and see how much he loves his partner."

Ianto looked at him like he was insane. "It's a machine —"

And maybe he was. A little. "And you think machines can't feel devotion? Because let me tell you —"

"You said _love_." He stepped in closer and leaned both hands on the desk, gazing with such uncharacteristically naked appeal that Jack's heart softened in response. "Jack, what is it? What's going on inside your head? Talk to me, please…"

As he gazed into those clear blue eyes his mind flashed back to the snowy street, to speaking the name of Captain Jack Harkness and wanting to share a different name instead. The name that every Time Agent gave up when they joined the Agency; the name whose awakening in the mind of another was all the proof required for unqualified trust. But the Name at the core of the man called Jack Harkness had not been spoken… and even if legend had it that the longing to share the secret was proof almost as conclusive, Jack wasn't a man given to putting his faith in fairy tales. 

Still, he offered what honesty he could. "If there's one thing I've learned, it's to trust my instincts. He's telling us the truth, as far as he can, but he doesn't really know what's going on. He has no idea what brought him here, or how somebody could mask a temporal signature, or why they'd want to rip his mind out of the past and implant it into a body from the future. And until we know the answers to those questions we have to keep him here, for his safety as much as anybody else's."

"You have no reason to trust him," Ianto insisted, then caught himself: "It, I mean."

The pronoun change might have been a slip of the tongue. Jack chose to take it as evidence that Ianto wanted to sympathize with him, and in return it was only fair to provide reassurance. "That's why he's staying in the Vault. For now."

"For now." He repeated the words as if he couldn't quite believe they'd come out of Jack's mouth. "I usually keep my nose out of your business —" He ignored Jack's grin and snort of laughter. "— but for God's sake, listen to reason!" 

"If you're asking me to kill him," and he didn't try to mask the steel in his voice this time, "the answer's no. Not unless I have to. We deal with enough death."

Under his calm exterior Ianto had his own iron core, his own nearly savage convictions. His breathing had quickened and deepened, and his eyes were dangerously narrowed as he gazed fixedly into Jack's. "It could be a sleeper agent — it could be a new iteration of the Cybermen!"

"There's no proof of that," Jack said evenly. His own breathing and body language was under tight control, although it was a near thing.

"There's no proof otherwise." The factotum straightened, his cheeks flushed with something less pleasant than remembered pleasures, and visibly composed himself before straightening his jacket with a fussy little tug of both hands on the hem. "You know I'm right."

"Yes. I do." Calm. Reasonable. Did that really conceal his inner fire? "But I also know that I'm in charge, and he's not going to die on my watch unless there's a damned good reason for it." 

"He's tried to compromise our systems."

"He has, has he?"

"Five times in the last two hours. I offered to wake you, but Tosh said new security protocols are holding steady."

Jack's heart rate accelerated just enough to make itself felt, a tightness beneath his breastbone and a pressure under the line of his jaw. He shrugged and picked up his cup of coffee. "We're standing between him and his pilot. He wants to rescue him — that's the beginning and end of this as far as he's concerned."

"Who's to say what it'll do to accomplish that goal?" Ianto persisted. "What if this is just the beginning? After what it did to Gwen's cell phone, it's just not safe to —"

Jack sipped. Swallowed. Put the cup carefully aside and leaned fully forward, resting his elbows on the desk and fixing his office manager with a flat stare at close range. "If he wanted to attack us, he would have — but he's sitting pretty in his cell, and do you know why?" The skeptical quirk of Ianto's left eyebrow was query enough. "Because he's bound by a version of Asimov's Laws, and he's not going to risk harming a human being by trying to shoot his way out."

"So why not give it free run of the place," Ianto demanded, "if you're convinced it's —"

"Because the dedication to protecting human life doesn't mean his intentions are entirely benign. There's still a lot of damage he could do if he really set his mind to it —"

"— and you could be wrong." He looked down, then away, then back into Jack's eyes. "And you know it. He could be lying. He could be insane."

"And if that's the case," Jack said quietly, holding his lover's gaze, "and he makes an aggressive move, he's exactly where we want him. Any idea how Tosh is coming with the damping field?"

"She finished it —" He checked his watch. "Forty-seven minutes ago."

"Good." Damn it, his breathing had quickened and deepened in spite of himself. He shifted into a more upright position, reducing the intensity of the energy between them and covering his own growing anger with a light-hearted tone. "See? Nothing to worry about. Don't suppose there's any chance you could find some jam to go with this toast?"

Ianto gazed at him for another couple of heartbeats, and Jack could see him mentally washing his hands of the whole thing just before he turned and headed for the door. As Jack was reaching for his coffee again he stopped in the doorway and turned, his voice low but penetrating: "Jack?"

Looking up, he saw the fire in Ianto's eyes shining clear as he stated: "Machines can't be trusted. They always have their own agenda, and human life means nothing to them. You know that, too. I don't know why you've forgotten it."

He took his leave with a stride even more controlled than usual, leaving Jack at uncomfortable leisure to ponder just how much of a hot mess he currently was, inside and out. 


	8. Chapter Seven: "... And Keep Your Hands To Yourself" (T-10.9)

One brisk shower, a change of clothes, and almost a full cup of coffee later, Jack was back at his desk and intent on summarizing the events of the past eleven hours. He polished off the last bite of toast, brushed a stray bit of crust off the left-hand page of the journal — reflecting as he did so that at the age of roughly two hundred and fifteen years he should have learned how to keep crumbs off the table by now — and bent over the book again, resuming the most recent line of neat even characters:

_no evidence of hostile intent. Subject states it is bound by a version of Asimov's Laws (1? Also 2 and 3?), T. unable to access subject's database to confirm. Given Subject's demonstrated abilities (energy projection capable of interfering with rifts, radiation profile indicates also devastating to organic tissue with 9.8C MDQ), Subject is confined to Vault pending its cooperation with full diagnostic scans. If Subject complies, will consider future storage options depending on the_

No mention of cool skin under his fingers and a responding flow of essential life-force. Certainly no mention of any inconvenient Names.

_results. Present conclusion: Subject's conduct is fully consistent with its claims thus far. Contain and observe, maintaining option to incapacitate w/damper field tech developed by T. Subject has repeatedly requested return to its point of origin. Reinsertion, while preferable to permanent confinement by Torchwood, is unlikely to be a viable course due to temporal profile mis—_

Tosh's voice in his earpiece interrupted: " _Jack?"_

He finished the last half of the word and completed the sentence _—match. —_ before pausing and looking up, his gaze shifting to the middle distance. "Go ahead."

 _"KITT just launched a peer-to-peer attack on the mainframe's primary firewall._ "

Jack's heart clenched in his chest. This was no case of delicately probing for a crack in the baseboard of a wall: this was a sledgehammer strike directed at a load-bearing member, an act that couldn't be ignored. "And?"

" _It failed. Naturally. But I've got to admit, it was a near thing. I think he's losing patience._ "

He closed the journal, rising from his chair — and for a second he found he had to rest his hands on his desk and bow his head, closing his eyes against the surge of _anger_ that welled from the core of him, lighting a fire deep in his hindbrain. _You had one job, damn you — stay quiet, keep your fucking head down until we could figure things out —_  

Well, time had just run out — and it was nobody's fault but the android locked in the basement, facing summary deactivation, and worse, if he didn't stop kicking up the traces.

"I'm on it." Jack exited his office and headed straight for the Vaults, making no particular effort to hide the rage rapidly gathering steam through his entire body. When he slammed through the door at the bottom of the stairs he was already roaring a command: "Damn it, stop trying to access our systems!"

KITT blinked open his strange eyes, unclasped his hands from behind his back, and took one rebellious step forward, his head set at a confrontational slant. "Or you'll do what, exactly? Lock me up?" he demanded, with a chaser of scathing derision: "Oh, too late, you already have!"

Reaching the cell, Jack faced the android squarely and stabbed his left forefinger at its defiant face, his voice dropping to a venomous hiss. "Trust me, you do _not_ want to piss me off! Because if you do, I guarantee you won't like what happens next."

_I'm trying to keep you in one piece! What part about 'cooperate with us and we'll let you go on processing, refuse and we have to protect ourselves' don't you —_

The threat didn't seem to impress his prisoner. "Maybe you missed the part where I told you that my own safety isn't my primary concern in this situation. This has gone on long enough. I have to get to Michael!"

"I'm sorry," Jack lilted mockingly, "but he's currently in another dimension — and besides, you're about thirty years too late to pull his balls out of the fire."

KITT's eyes narrowed, his own voice growing dangerously soft. "I think you're underestimating who you're dealing with. If there's a way to reach him, rest assured I'll find it. Now let — me — _out_."

Jack snorted and turned on his heel, heading back toward the door leading back to the main level, drawling sweetly over his shoulder: "Well, since you put it that way… _no_."

"Has anyone ever told you that you're an infuriating ass?" KITT yelled after him.

He stopped in his tracks and spun round again, eyes ablaze. "And you're a mouthy little brat — oh, and while we're on the subject," another jab with an angry forefinger, " _behave yourself_ and keep your virtual hands out of the cookie jar!"

_Please, for Goddess' sake, listen to me… if you really_ **_can_ ** _hear me, if you can see into me that way, you've got to know that I don't want to take this to the next level — but if you threaten my team…_

He'd barely turned back around when KITT spoke, low and grim: "Then you leave me no choice."

This time the pause and the glare conveyed pure warning, and more of a plea than he would have liked. "You can't take action against us, remember? You're programmed to preserve human life — unless that was a lie. And if you try to break out of here, you'll have to kill us all before we let you get past us." 

KITT took another step closer to the glass, looking Jack up and down with something that might have been pity if it weren't so implacable. "I've never lied to you, Captain," he said quietly. "It's really not my style. And I have no need to cause you or your friends any harm whatsoever. Your computers, on the other hand…"

He pressed his right hand to a hole in the partition, and two lithe blue tendrils as thin as earbud lines snaked across the corridor, whipping behind the video screen hanging from the far wall and boring inward. Jack didn't even have time to think about intercepting them before the screen went insane, pictures and blocks of text and raw data whipping across it like water pouring from a broken jug.

"Tosh?" he demanded, even though he knew full well what was happening, and his heart was sinking like a stone even as his protective instincts awoke to savage life. _KITT, no, listen to me, don't make me do this —_

The mathematician's voice sounded in Jack's earpiece: _"He's patched directly into the mainframe — bypassed the firewall, first level, second, third… I'm compensating…"_  

"I'm sorry it's come to this," KITT was saying, and damned if he didn't actually sound a little regretful under the bright steely note of determination. Elegant patterns of blue radiance were flowing up the lines of his throat and striating all the way to his cheekbones and his temples, while similar energy pooled in the palms of his long-fingered hands, faintly humming. Through the partition Jack heard the distinctive sound of the cell door unlocking, although the android remained where it was: it had gained access to the security systems. "Grant me safe passage out of here, and your word of honour that you won't come after me, or I'll wipe every shred of data you poss—"

_It's my duty. I have no choice._

Jack found his voice: "Tosh, now!"

He didn't feel the damper field kick in, but its effects on the android were immediate: KITT's voice cut off mid-word, his eyes widening in visible shock as he staggered back from the glass, the glow beneath his skin faltering and fading. The tendrils disengaged and flowed back into his hand, the tails of them dragging sluggishly against the edges of the ventilation hole as he dropped to his knees, clutching at his chest and his throat. While Jack watched he reached toward the barrier with one trembling hand, fingers clawing at the air as he cried out in anguished despair: "No… please, I… have to…!"

"Hit him again." The order came out evenly, or at least he was pretty sure the shaking in his core didn't reach the surface.

KITT stared up at him, appalled, the light in his eyes cycling wildly. " _No,_ " he pleaded, his voice low and slurred, and tried to reach the glass one final time before slumping to the floor on his right side, as unjointed as a puppet whose strings had been cut. He twitched once, twice, tipped his head back with a grating static-laced moan, and finally, mercifully, lay still.

Jack took a careful step to his own right, just far enough to make sure that those wide-open eyes were now a blankly solid black, before querying: "How's it looking?" 

A pause, while Tosh checked her latest readings. _"I'm still having a hard time seeing inside, but the view's a lot better than it was. The nanites appear to be inactive. I'm not picking up any internal data flow whatsoever."_

"Any chance they could reactivate somehow and rewire him to restore consciousness?"

_"I doubt it, unless they could completely redesign and reconstruct his systems to resist the damper field's electromagnetic profile — and even then, they'd have to 'wake up' themselves first. And I'm not detecting any hint of that kind of activity."_

"So he's neutralized." He had to swallow a lump in his throat to say it.

_"It looks that way."_

"Well, that was easy." He kept it light and worked his shoulders subtly back and forth, trying without success to banish the tension locking up his muscles. "Now we just have to keep him sedated until we can put him on ice permanently."

 _"I've been working on a design for a portable damper field generator in the form of a collar,"_ Tosh offered. _"We can keep him in the Vault until it's ready, then install it on him and transfer him wherever we like once it's in place."_ Another pause. _"I think his internal security system is also offline. If so, we should be able to safely perform a diagnostic dissection."_

That was the next logical step with a demonstrated hostile, and it wasn't intended to leave the machine in a functional condition afterwards. Tosh was brilliant: she'd find a way to extract the nanite tech and adapt it to their needs, of that Jack was certain. Whatever was useful would be repurposed; the rest would be locked up for future research. In any case, KITT as a conscious entity would cease to exist.

_Unless her original theory is correct, and the nanites could bring him back…_

That was a hope that Jack couldn't afford, because he found the possibility of its failure a prospect even worse than no hope at all. Still, he had to close his eyes briefly before issuing the order that would wrap up this case permanently: "Get on it."

The silence in the room hung heavy as Jack stepped up to the glass and squatted down, the better to address his fallen adversary at a volume only it could have heard, if it had still been processing incoming data: "I understand why you did it. But you left _us_ no choice." All the reasons for his decisions to this point rose to the tip of his tongue, but he kept them to himself: the entire matter was now academic, after all.

Still, the words slipped free, scarcely more than an inflected breath: "I just wish…"

More things that were better unsaid. He glanced up at the cam, sighed, and looked down at the android for the final time, pressing his right hand gently to the glass a foot or so above its unresponsive head. He looked his last at the slightly parted lips that would never speak again and offered the only words he could: 

"Goodbye, KITT."

He rose to his feet, set his head straight, and departed the Vault without once looking back.  


	9. Chapter Eight: And Death Shall Have No Dominion (T-10.7)

He managed not to stumble going up the stairs, even though the pain in his head and his chest was nearly blinding him. It was called 'heartbreak' because that was exactly what it felt like, as if he'd taken a piercing internal wound that was swiftly bleeding out.

It would heal. It always had in the past. After all, it could scarcely do anything else.

_But when Nell died…_

She had spoken his Name Indelible, because he had shared it with her as his beloved wife: he could still remember how full of light her eyes had been, when she realized the gift she'd been given. And by speaking it, by comprehending how it entwined with Jack's essence and encoded the music of his soul, she had earned the right to be accorded the tribute of his uninhibited grief.

How could someone who had never so much as whispered his Name tear into and away from him like this, leaving the ache of utter emptiness behind?

He knew exactly how it would have sounded. The voice of a machine was burned into his mind: he could imagine any sentence in KITT's timbre and inflection, the way he would apply nuances of humour or scorn or urgency, the way each syllable would taste on his synthetic tongue. He _knew_ , and at this moment he would have given anything to be able to annihilate that knowledge. 

In all his life to date, the long span of decades that stretched interminably toward the dim reaches of the future, he'd been granted the good fortune of hearing his Name spoken by two people in the course of his career, when most Time Agents were never even blessed with a single partner who knew them so intimately. For a while he'd toyed with the possibility of deceiving himself that the man called John Hart might be one of that select number, but sanity had prevailed and he'd kept the precious secret safely locked away from hands that would have played with it and soiled it and used it to tear him to bloody screaming pieces. 

Two Consorts of the Name — neither of them from his own century, but hey, some things were just too much to ask for. He'd been blessed indeed. But no joy came without its corresponding price, and now he was paying the balance owed in spades. It would have been worse if love was involved, of that he was well aware, but obsession was proving more than awful enough under present circumstances. 

Tosh looked toward him as he entered the main level, her finely drawn eyebrows pulling together in an unspoken question. She'd seen him with his namesake; she knew the aspect of Jack's sorrow, darkening his usually bright eyes. He paused as he passed her desk, and laid his hand tenderly on her shoulder, and when he smiled down at her she laid her hand over his, the pressure light and comforting.

_Though lovers be lost, love shall not;_  
 _And Death shall have no dominion…_

He squeezed her shoulder and moved on, as he always had. As he always did. He went to his desk and sat back down, and leaned his elbows on the desktop and clasped his hands tightly before his yearning mouth, and stared at the opposite wall without really seeing it at all. 

_Faith in their hands shall snap in two,_  
 _And the unicorn evils run them through..._

The nanites had been disabled. Which meant the immortal being could be destroyed. Or could it? Would Tosh and Owen take KITT apart, neatly label each piece and file it away, only to have them somehow reconstitute? And if they did…

… if they did, then Jack's problems would have only just begun. Because KITT didn't strike him as the kind to forget, and certainly not as the sort who was inclined to easily forgive. He would have added to his long list of enemies a creature eternal, one who had accessed the Hub's systems to an unknown degree and who would have the means to —

— to use the Rift Manipulator, perhaps. Maybe even to devise the necessary equations, or simply to open a portal using its own inherent abilities. He would go back to Michael Knight, the man whose image shone at the core of him like an undying star. Resentment, revenge, payback — tempting, perhaps, but nothing in comparison to the magnetic compulsion of his love. He would depart this dimension as soon as he possibly could, without once looking back.

_Where blew a flower may a flower no more_  
 _Lift its head to the blows of the rain…_

If the nanites were capable of the miracle of resurrection, Jack might get one last glimpse of him, one last sharp exchange of words, before he was gone forever: a parting as final as if he'd died in truth.

_It doesn't matter. It_ **_can't_ ** _matter._

He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against his tented knuckles, willing the resonance of those declarations ever deeper into his mind, rewriting everything they touched. The pheromonal scent he'd picked up in the SUV… _could_ it have been some form of mind control? Which would explain a lot… but if so, then why wasn't anybody else spinning out? Why was he the only one sitting in his office, struggling with emotions that couldn't be allowed to exist?

That had to be it. He'd have Owen check him out… as soon as he gathered enough energy to get out of his chair. As soon as he'd wrestled the bone-deep howl of regret into submission and reminded himself of all the other times he'd fallen head-over-heels for some pretty face, only to have the all-consuming hunger die to cold ashes as quickly as a fire in dry grass.

 _That's not what this is,_ his instincts insisted.

 _That's what it has to be,_ his higher brain functions declared jovially. _Come on, what's one more loss between friends? One more body and mind broken down in the mill of Time? Better get used to it, because you're the only one who's going to make out of this alive!_

Unless…

Unless. The nanites. It all came down to them, in the end… and to four syllables constituting a single Name.

"He didn't say it." The whispered words dropped from his lips like tears of dark myrrh. "Not even once. It's… I'm tired. That's all. The pheromones, and my mind playing tricks on me…"

_Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,_  
 _And Death shall have no dominion…_

"Jack?"

It was Gwen, leaning in around the edge of the doorway. He drew a quick steadying breath, too soft for her to hear, then raised his head with a bright smile. "Hey, there… sorry, must have dozed off. Long night."

"Yeah," she said, but her lovely dark eyes were too keen by half. Their gaze slipped into him and tried to open him up, as solicitous as her spoken words: "Are you okay?" 

"Just fine," he responded lightly. "Never better. Just writing up this morning's log entry."

"All right," and this time the slow drag of each word declared as plain as plain that she didn't believe Jack's lie for a second. "Only, Tosh said you'd ordered the android shut down and scheduled for dissection."

"Yeah, well…" He leaned back in his chair and picked up the pen he'd been writing with, turning it in his fingers, studying it with deliberate casualness. "It got tired of waiting and hacked into the mainframe. Ianto was right after all — it's too dangerous for intact containment." Glancing up again, he smiled a little apologetically, as if asking a great favour. "If Owen's in, go make sure he'll be ready to start the dissection as soon as Tosh has the damper collar installed, okay? And tell them to keep a full damper field on the medical unit during the procedure — better not take any chances."

Gwen nodded. Her eyes were wide and intent, trying to draw him out. Jack, who'd had enough people gazing into his soul for one day, sat up straighter and turned his full attention to his journal, tacitly dismissing her. After a couple of seconds she took the hint and left to make the requested arrangements, and he struggled through all of half a sterile line before dropping the pen and bowing his head into his hands, wearily praying for an end that would never come. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Excerpts taken from "And Death Shall Have No Dominion", by Dylan Thomas (1933).


	10. Chapter Nine: Diagnosis (T-9.8)

Whatever Owen's other failings might be — and most people agreed he had more than his fair share, although Jack certainly wasn't one to judge — nobody could ever accuse him of dawdling over his work. As soon as Jack was seated on the edge of the medical unit's gurney he drew his boss's blood with swift efficiency, popped a sample into the blood chemistry analyzer, and had the results onscreen less than ten seconds later: "Your readings are definitely off."

Which wasn't exactly unexpected. Still, Jack found the announcement uncharacteristically unsettling, another disturbing current in the already seething turmoil of his mind and heart. "Off? How?"

Owen turned the screen to face him, narrating the results as he indicated each one: "Elevated testosterone and estrogen levels, absolute boatloads of adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin, plus a few other biochemicals unique to you that you've somehow neglected to provide me with names for…" 

He cast an accusatory glance in Jack's direction, which Jack didn't consider worthy of a response: he was too busy staring at the readings, taking in the shape of exactly how fucked he was. And Owen, seeing that he wasn't going to get the reaction he was looking for, shrugged philosophically before continuing: "Your oxytocin has always been higher than standard human baseline, but now it's even more so." Coming round the table, he stepped right up between Jack's open legs and whipped a penlight out of his lab coat's breast pocket, flashing it into each of Jack's eyes in turn. "Pupils are dilated, skin temperature is up by a full degree and a quarter, erectile tissues are in quite the state… caudate nucleus is lit up like a Christmas tree, and your limbic system is in a perfect frenzy." He tucked the penlight back into its pocket, stepped back out of Jack's personal space, and tapped the keyboard again to call up a chemical profile of diabolical complexity. "And there's your cause: a cocktail of synthetic pheromones with exceptionally long-term psychoactivity."

Jack's mind flashed back almost two years, to a hapless innocent girl named Carys Fletcher. "Sex pheromones?"

"In this case, not half that simple." He stepped back round the table to pull the drug synthesizer unit out of its slot in the equipment ranged against the nearest wall. "The Fletcher girl only made people want to screw her. But pheromonal compounds don't just compel the old in-and-out: they're also responsible for social cohesion and pair-bonding, among other things." A considering glance at Jack across the table. "Don't suppose you've had the inexplicable urge to get friendly with any prisoners lately, have you?"

He had to swallow against a sudden tightness in his throat, fighting to crush the cry of denial that rose from the core of him: _No! He's lying! It can't be, this is_ ** _real_** _, it feels so…_

It took a couple of seconds to force himself to voice the last question he wanted to know the answer to, the only one that mattered: "Can you identify the source?"

Owen input a quick keyboard command to call up a real-time air quality scan from the Vault, and studied the results for a couple of seconds before maximizing the CCTV feed to show KITT's body on the floor of his cell, still crumpled exactly where Jack had last seen him fall. "The only new thing we've picked up." He turned his attention to the synthesizer, calibrating it to Jack's latest blood work results. "I told you it was trouble, but of course nobody ever listens to me… Should've scanned it the second we brought it in, but we had no reason to think that a machine would be putting out a pheromone signature strong enough to drop a bull elephant —"

Jack had to look away from the screen. His heart was pounding hot in his breast — _I betrayed him! I gave the order that did this to him!_ — and the weight of bitter guilt bowed his proud head, his eyes squeezing closed under a wave of hopeless desire that threatened to burn away the rest of the universe. Knowing what was happening to him should have pulled the serpent's fangs, but instead of weakening, his compulsion was resurging even stronger — the animal within him locked in a death-duel with his rational mind, now that his mind had solid evidence to use against it. 

 _It's all a lie._ He wrapped those words around him like armour, clung to them like a mantra: _A lie of chemistry and a pheromonal cheat. It isn't real, it isn't real,_ ** _it isn't real_** _…_

"… teach us to let them sit in the front seat with us, won't it?…"

 ** _He's_** _real,_ declared a voice that would not be silenced. The armour was no defence against it, because it originated from deeper inside Jack than words could touch. _He's real, and he's_ ** _yours_** _. Nothing's going to change that and you know it._

_Not now. Not ever._

Impossible. Undeniable, in his current state. He fought to bite back a moan and a shiver. If any trace of them escaped, Owen gave no sign of hearing or seeing it as he loaded up a hypo, crossed back to left Jack's side, and touched light fingertips to his jawline to tilt his head to the right. The crisp bite of the injection in his neck pierced through Jack's misery, and he opened his eyes to find Owen studying him closely.

"Give it a few seconds."

He stared back, too shaken to care if his eyes were too wide, or too devastated. 

_I can't lose this, not now, not when I've tasted it and —_

_— and been poisoned, if it's true, sick unto death —_

"You're sure?" The words felt like a whisper of his own heart's blood. "Absolutely sure?"

A curt nod. "I'll know more about how the whole thing works after we've performed the dissection."

The thought of KITT being torn to pieces prompted a new scream of red-hot denial from the depths of Jack's soul. He opened his mouth to declare that there was _no way in Hell_ that was going to happen, _ever_ —

"There you go," Owen smiled thinly, and stepped away again to input another round of calibrations into the synthesizer. "That's the short-term dose. Now for something with a bit more staying power…" 

Jack stared after him, feeling as if the whole room were in sudden freefall. His head was clearing rapidly, the desperate fevered pulse of his thoughts slowing and cooling more with every passing second. The parts of his disordered mind clicked back into proper relation with each other, and as obsession faded, rationality made a rapid comeback: "And we were all in the same enclosed space with it… Has anybody else been affected?"

"Given that nobody else has reported being stricken with an all-consuming desire to snog the walking laptop… I'd have to say, no." An amused glance with more than a trace of _schadenfreude_ behind it. "Just you. Then again, for you shagging anything that'll hold still long enough is only standard operating procedure, am I right?"

He gave his head a quick shake, trying to ignore the sudden chill in the air. _Body temperature must be dropping…_ "Not like this." He could feel his nervous system standing down, his heartbeat slowing and the ache in his groin subsiding, the intoxicating pulse of desire swiftly fading toward inaudibility. "At least that explains how… unsettled I've been feeling, ever since we brought it in." 

"Ah." Owen raised a cautioning finger, meeting Jack's stern questioning gaze solemnly. "There's a slight problem with that hypothesis: you'd have a hard time setting up an experiment to determine whether your current state of helpless yearning was caused by its pheromonal output, or whether your sensitivity to its pheromonal output was triggered by helpless yearning." Solemnity became the sparkle of mirth in his dark eyes. "Congratulations — you may have been hit with an irresistible, industrial strength dose of android lust juice, or you might, just possibly… be in love."

Jack, who was completely out of patience for one day, glared without restraint. "That's not funny."

"Didn't intend it to be." All business now, he loaded up a new hypo from the synthesizer and came around Jack's right side, waiting for him to tilt his head and expose his throat before injecting the contents. "There. That should take the edge off for about twenty-four hours, by which point the damned thing'll hopefully be in a lot of very small, very inert pieces. In the meantime, I'd advise you to stay in your office and keep a picture book of Margaret Thatcher having sex with Ronald Reagan handy, just in case anything tries to rear its ugly head."

This time Jack stepped down off the table as soon as the physician gave him room to do so. "You'll call me when it's over," he stated, still half-glaring.

Owen nodded, sticking both hands into his lab coat's pockets. "After the bits are all squared away, yeah, I'll give you the all-clear. We'll have to decontaminate that section of the Vault before you go down there again, though — bloody pain in the arse that'll be…"

"Keep me posted." Jack turned away and nearly bounded up the stairs, exulting in how easy it was to breathe, to move, to _think_ — but stopped halfway up to issue an directive: "Oh, and by the way — don't tell the others."

"A little embarrassed, are we?" He glanced away as if in disbelief, wearing a crooked smirk. "There's a first…"

"I'll take care of it." He jabbed a warning forefinger directly at Owen's heart. "That's an order."

The medic fired off a mocking salute. "Right, no gossiping about the boss's uppity robot-rogering penis, aye aye sir!"

Jack nodded and took his leave, deliberately ignoring the mental images that final taunt brought to mind: cool smooth skin and hungry light slowly writhing under his hands, soft cries of newly awakened passion, lips rapturously parted and black eyes far too bright, and four syllables whispered into their shared breath in the wake of a final sated kiss…

Okay, so the magnetic pull of fascination wasn't entirely laid to rest. But Jack could resist it now that he recognized it for what it was. 

He had no choice, because the alternative was absolutely unthinkable: give in to the thrall of chemical coercion, and let the machine go on compiling. Set it free, and all the consequences be damned.

_To let him be mine, now and forever…._

And if the thought of all he couldn't have made Jack feel a little savage all over again, even with pheromonal suppressant flowing through his system — well, nobody else ever had to know.


	11. Chapter Ten: Reconciliation (T-9.6)

The first thing Jack saw when he hit the top of the stairs was Ianto, neat and proper in his buttoned-up suit, puttering around the main level — wiping the desks with a damp cloth, collecting used cups and generally tidying. The sight of that smooth boyish face, so charmingly domestic, filled him with a rush of cleaner emotions: fondness, pride, and warm desire of ordinary proportions. It was like being bathed in cool water after boiling in oil, and since he was passing Ianto's position anyway on the way to his office he paused on the way to mend a couple of fences.

"Listen, I'm —"

Ianto almost never interrupted him, but now he turned quickly to look Jack directly in the eyes. "No, I'm the one who should apologize."

"Who said anything about apologizing?" But the smile he offered softened the taunt, and the tension in Ianto's crisply suited shoulders relaxed a fraction. Good. Although the younger man always held himself with a certain degree of tight control, at least in public, a truly tense Ianto was never a good thing from Jack's point of view.

"I'm sorry I wasn't more diplomatic," Ianto was continuing, still meeting Jack's gaze with unflinching earnestness. "It's just that… after what I've seen…" A shrug and an uneasy glance away. "Well. You know."

"I do." And he did. It had been the first time he'd kissed that cupid's bow mouth, pouring life back into the broken vessel of Ianto's body, and he was unlikely to forget the dark day of Lisa's resurrection for a very long time to come. But that was then, and this was now, so he ducked his chin a little and held Ianto's gaze, raising both eyebrows to convey the depth of his sincerity. "Hey. I'm not taking any chances here."

"So I've heard." He smiled for the first time today, slight but warm. "I know you wouldn't put us in danger — well, not unless you had to. But especially not when it comes to… things like that."

The trust warmed Jack's heart, and he grinned outright, curving his left hand around the nape of his lover's neck and giving it a quick comforting squeeze. They were alone, at least for the moment: the gesture of affection was allowed according to the unspoken terms between them. "Tosh and Owen are going to dissect it," he stated softly, feeling sweet relief settle deeper in his bones with every word, "and lock it away where it can't pose a threat to anybody, ever again."

After a moment Ianto nodded, but a new worried crease had settled between his eyebrows. "Would you have really…" Another shrug, another sidelong glance. "You know..." An embarrassed cough. "Used it. That way."

He let a hot smile tug at one corner of his mouth, more bitter than amused. The presence of his official 'little bit on the side' had quelled the last traces of deeply wrongful obsession, so there was no need to bring up his recent case of pheromonal fever: it was over, after all, with no lasting harm done even if a subliminal physical burn lingered in certain body parts. "Doesn't matter. The point is, I didn't." He dropped his hand and shifted the quality of his smile from _sincere_ to _charming_ , full of incredulity. "Come on, do you really think I'd be stupid enough to shove my dick into something that's —?"

It wasn't much: the tiniest change in timbre of the Hub's background hum, but Jack, who lived as well as worked here, instantly felt it — and it set off a scream of alarm in his hindbrain. At the same instant a more subliminal shock ran through his flesh, old Time Agent instincts awakening with a rush of adrenaline.

"Jack?" Ianto was frowning at him, puzzled by his sudden silence. "What's —?"

Whatever was coming, it was coming fast — and Jack knew the essential nature of it, if not the exact particulars. 

"Code One Incursion!" He snapped out the alarm, knowing his comm unit would pick up the carrier wave of urgency in his voice and transmit it to all personnel on site — which included, at the moment, every member of his team, even if he didn't know exactly where Tosh and Gwen were. "Repeat — Code One Incursion! Initiate lockdown —"

A flare of golden radiance to his left made him whip round to face it, but he barely had time to take in the general shape of the rift — a rift, in the heart of the Hub! — before something else slammed through him with the force of a taser's shock, carried not by a bullet or a barb, but through the air itself. His body jerked with convulsive reaction before crashing to the floor, where he lay weakly spasming 

_— portal big enough for a humanoid, subsonic carrier wave weapons tech —_

with his mind helplessly racing. He was aware of Ianto collapsed beside him, making an anguished grating noise deep in his throat, but he couldn't even shift his limbs enough to put himself between the archivist and the tall graceful figure who emerged from the rift's yellow-green glow, its left hand resting on a small organic device clipped to the belt of its red-brown leather catsuit. 

A catsuit in a style that Jack had seen before, less than twelve hours ago, through another rift that had led to a previously uncharted dimension.

In fact this individual's overall configuration, right down to the flowing scarlet cape and pointed feline features, bore a remarkable resemblance to the woman KITT-as-robotic-car had cut down immediately before being catapulted through to Torchwood's version of reality.

She crossed the metal floor at a brisk pace, her soft boots almost soundless, and went down on one knee to peer into Jack's face with golden eyes whose brilliance was only partially muted by the dark-glassed goggles that covered them. Her mahogany skin bore slowly flexing salmon-coloured gills down both sides of her throat, and her slicked-back indigo hair writhed subtly over her broad shoulders with a faint liquid hiss audible even over the high-pitched susurration of the dimensional gateway behind her. She reached down, and Jack's instincts shrieked a warning that his body couldn't take advantage of when she trailed the tip of one forefinger along the line of his jaw without quite touching him.

"Yes," the unknown alien said in a sweetly musical voice, " _most_ satisfactory," and Jack felt her sharply pointed fingernail dip in just enough to lightly cut his chin. A wave of dizziness flooded his body and his mind, and the last thing he saw through the darkness rushing in from all sides was two more tall figures stepping through into the heart of Torchwood, both of them carrying rifle-type weapons that promised anything but a peaceful exchange of cultural values.

Jack managed one final thought, broken but sharp as a siren

_— the rift on Womanby Street, that was their first attempt! —_

before the alien woman's poison touch sent him plunging into all-consuming oblivion.

 

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 (And as a bonus to my Constant Readers, here's a quick-and-dirty graphic I knocked together of KITT's android body from the "Geometry" ficverse:

 

 (… I think I'm starting to see Jack's point. :D Pretty pretty creature…)

 (This is also the point where I shamelessly ask for comments. Please? I haven't received any for several chapters, which makes me suspect that I may be badly miscalculating somewhere. So, if you're enjoying the ride thus far, I'd love to hear it. *bows* Many thanks!)

 


	12. Chapter Eleven: Resonance (T-1.6)

Tired… so tired that even breathing was a test of endurance…

He managed to crack his eyelids open, but all he could see was an undifferentiated blur of different colours of light. Sound filtered through, a strange voice rendered slurred and sluggish: 

"… have ways of ensuring your compliance…"

"No." Tosh, trying to sound brave. Even through the rising and falling hum in his ears Jack could clearly hear the fear beneath. "I won't do it."

Brief melodic vocalization, almost a laugh. "Oh, but you will. Because if you don't…"

The hum swelled to a roar — dragging him down, taking him under…

~~~~~~~~~

_… until the roar became a happier confusion of sounds: music and chatter, real-time footage of the London Eye on every screen, and party horns blowing as cheers of "Happy New Year!" rang through the Hub. And none more merry than Jack himself, especially when Gwen gave him a mischievous sidelong glance and a warm kiss on the cheek that lingered just a little too long._

_He closed his eyes briefly and let the glow of it infuse his entire body, along with the fleeting pang of old regrets. After all, he knew she'd be going home with the man drunkenly clinking plastic glasses with Ianto less than two metres away — and he was okay with that, really he was._

_He had to be, because he had no other choice…_

~~~~~~~~~

His eyes were still closed. He was walking stiffly, but he had no memory of standing up, and no idea where his legs were taking him. 

Left foot lifting a little higher, onto a familiar metal stair. Right foot up, left foot again, right, left…

The faint thrumming that permeated the air felt like it was getting right under his skin, trying to stir him to action. For a second time he succeeded in blinking open his eyes, struggling to focus on the oddly contoured and darkly variegated back preceding him up the staircase.

"None of that," a musical voice chided from behind him, and a slender hand closed around the back of his neck. Between its palm and his skin something slowly writhed, sinking deeper, digging into his flesh —

~~~~~~~~~

_"You know you're making a big mistake."_

_He stood on a long wide balcony crafted of pale marble, gazing out over a lush tropical landscape painted in purples and blue-greens beneath a sunset sky. The evening air was cool, and behind him, beyond the spreading precincts of the Temple of Love's Eternity, two full moons were rising in their glory: he knew this without the benefit of sight, just as he knew that he was richly and formally dressed in an elegant style which, although alien, made him look even more handsome than was usually the case._

_Scowling, he turned toward his former partner, the man his team knew as John Hart. The rogue Time Agent, himself decked out to impress, was gazing at him mildly, but he knew far too much to be so easily taken in by appearances of sympathy. "Oh yeah? And that 'opinion' — note I use the term loosely — wouldn't have anything to do with our little bout of it-was-great-to-know-you-but-now-it's-really-over sex last night, would it?"_

_John rolled his eyes pseudo-indulgently. "You weren't calling it so 'little' when I was busy —"_

_"Save it." A wave of confusion rolled through him: where exactly was he, and what was he about to do? His body, like an actor who knew its script well, kept right on going. "You have two choices: stand as a witness, or get back up to the_ ** _Delicacy_** _and leave us alone. Personally, I'd be much happier if you picked Door Number Two."_  

_"And miss the spectacle of your wedding day?" Incredulous now. "Well, your day of telempathic pair-bonding, to be more accurate... You're kidding, right? Somebody has to be present to give you away who appreciates the full extent of what's being given!"_

_The future, then… This man hadn't been present at any of his previous rites of marriage, thank the Goddess and all the Fates —_

_He ignored the not-so-thinly veiled innuendo and levelled a forefinger at his old — well, almost a day old, at any rate — lover. "One word out of turn and the guards will —"_

_"Yes, yes, throw me out on my oh-so-gorgeous ass, and me dressed up in my Sunday best, too!" And Jack had to admit that he did clean up pretty damned well, all scarlet and indigo neo-silk with merry sparkles of gold at earlobe and throat. "Don't worry, I'll behave myself, as boring as the prospect might be. After all, it's the little surprises that make these sort of events so memorable when you tell your children about them decades later!" A rueful shrug. "Not that you'll ever have any, but well, you know…"_

_Deep inside him something awoke with a sharp stab of wariness: there was more than one level of meaning to that statement, he was sure of it, and when it came to this individual such hidden depths were inevitably pits full of venomous snakes. But evidently his body-in-the-moment didn't pick up on it, because it cast a final warning glare at his former partner's bland smile and turned on its booted heel, heading back into the cool shadows of the Temple's interior._

_"Jack?" So mild, a razor edge that severed arteries so smoothly the fatal cut wasn't even felt. "Just remember, when everything goes badly wrong — remember that I tried to warn you!"_

_He didn't even pause. He had far better places to be. Still, the final words — shouted to follow him — echoed in the hallway around him as he strode toward the altar where friends and lovers old and new were waiting…_

_It was time for this Temple to finally earn its name in truth, and to kindle a flame that would still be burning when all its proud towers had crumbled into dust._

~~~~~~~~~

The hand was on his neck again — at his throat this time, tipping his head back and holding it there. He could feel that he was sitting down now, his forearms resting on the arms of an office chair. He was securely placed, but still paralyzed.

Close at hand the Rift wailed faintly, like the crying of a child for its father. He tried to rise, to go to its aid, and could only feel the quickening of his own heartbeat in response. 

A new voice, male, subservient but annoyed: "… much easier if you'd use some form of truth serum. I know you can —"

And the female voice, stern, just above his left shoulder: "And I've told you, compliance with our Destiny is only lawful if it is uncoerced by the _j'kar'ta_. Hold your tongue, Slaver! They will —"

He sank again, trying to raise his voice, not even sure if he succeeded in making a single sound.

~~~~~~~~~

_Dark. Quiet. His cell beneath his office, a place of safety, and a warm body lying alongside his own. Eyes closed, he breathed the clean scent of his lover's hair against his cheek, underlaid with the faint pleasant odours of sexual exertion and salty ejaculate._

_"Ianto…" He cupped the curve of that vulnerable-but-strong neck and ran his hand slowly down: shoulder, shoulder blade, subtly defined muscle all the way to buttocks that were still flushed with love-bites. He smiled, overwhelmed with a rush of sweet relief. "Listen, I just had the craziest dream —"_

_He barely felt it at first, the slightest silver pressure sliding home under his ribs — until it blossomed into a sickening pain he knew all too well. When he opened his eyes, gaze already fixed on own torso, he saw the hand that pressed the dagger home and his blood spilling over its fingers: hectic red, threaded through with pitch-black and fitful rivulets of vitally glowing blue._

_"I warned you," an unexpected voice purred — unexpected, but certainly not unknown. His eyes jerked upward to John's face, to John's body laid out beside him in unselfconscious appreciation of its own naked beauty. John met his gaze and smiled, all honey and poison. "Didn't I warn you, Jack? I said it would end badly, and it did."_

_He opened his mouth — to protest, to demand answers, maybe to scream —_

~~~~~~~~~

"… time to wake up, August Leader." 

The hand was still on him: caressing his shoulder through his shirt, trailing fingertips far too sharp up the tendon in his throat, tracing the line of his left cheekbone with the tenderness, almost, of a lover.

"Did you enjoy your _j'kar'ta_ -dreams? Did you find any trace of truth therein, perhaps, or merely lies of various hues?"

This time his lips parted and his lungs contracted: "Uh…" Not exactly a stirring speech, but a helluva lot better than anything else he'd managed so far. At the back of his neck, something flexed and dug ten small pointed limbs deeper into the skin on either side of his spine. With an all-consuming act of will he succeeded in shuttering his eyelids slowly open, and in focussing on the face of the creature bending over him: golden eyes behind bronze-framed goggles, and a sleek smile he wanted to wipe off her filthy face with his fists. 

"No matter," the alien woman continued conversationally, and nodded toward Jack's right, cupping his left cheek in her hand and turning his head toward the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the well of the Hub. He recognized the vantage point — the second level interrogation room, where Torchwood interviewed less dangerous Rift travellers — and he recognized two of the five figures below. One of them was Tosh, sitting at a computer station and typing on a keyboard, and the other was Owen, sitting ramrod-straight in his chair at his own station while an alien in organic-looking body armour pressed the business end of a similarly styled rifle to the base of his skull. "Very shortly, everything about your world will cease to be of consequence."

Jack rolled his eyes back in her direction, and ground out three crucial words: "What… are you?"

"The future masters of your planet," she said simply. "But in the mouths of our prey-fuel, we sometimes permit ourselves to be referred to as the Vore."


	13. Chapter Twelve: The Vore (T-1.5)

That single syllable, shaped by a slit of a mouth narrowly parting to reveal small sharp teeth, sent Jack's mind in several different directions instantly — _carnivore, omnivore, voracious_ — none of them particularly reassuring in combination with the words _prey_ and _fuel_. "Nice… name," he managed to grind out. "Did you… come up with it… yourself?"

The alien's hand came to rest on his shoulder again, its texture reptilian even through two layers of clothing and its temperature suggesting inner fires barely held in check. "Actually," she said with an amused purr, "no, we did not — it was given to us by one of the original Prey, in the dim reaches of our glorious past. Of course we wouldn't expect a _tsor'ta_ , little more than an animal, to comprehend the nuances of our true signifiers — you're so hopelessly blind, you couldn't even perceive the most basic scent-inscribers and pheromonal accents."

In the privacy of his mind, Jack uttered a savage curse: whatever they'd drugged him with, he still wasn't firing on all cylinders. He had to concentrate on drawing a quick shallow breath through his nose, and he had to consciously process the sensory data it conveyed: a rich rush of scent coming off that tall strong body, layers of organic complexity, leather and bio-armour and the strange feline flesh beneath…

… and the sharp, sweet, bitter odour of the venom concealed in her curving nails, making Jack's skin crawl with the bone-deep memory of its first kiss.

Aloud he concluded: "And let me guess… you're here… to try to… harvest us…"

"Ignorant cattle!" The dark slits of her pupils flared wide behind smoked glass, her ivory teeth flashing in a tiger's snarl. "You comprehend less than the worms of the earth!"

"So…" He tried to paste a sardonic grin on his face, but managed only a twitch of his lower lip. "… enlighten me."

In the blink of an eye, anger became amusement. "Don't make the critical error of assuming that we're having this —" A derisive little laugh. "— 'conversation' because your opinions matter to me, animal, or worse, because you could gain useful intelligence. Your Destiny has already been written, and you are merely a convenient way to pass the time while my subordinates perform their functions. You are _tsor'ta_ , incapable of synthesizing even the simplest _j'kar'ta…_ " She leaned a little closer, delicately sniffing the air just above the curve of his hair. "Although it must be allowed that your particular biochemical signature is more complex than that of your fellow primitives. Yes… I can see that they would follow you without even knowing why, in their sense-blindness." When she drew back again her lipless mouth was curved in a Mona Lisa smile. "Sleek corn-fed beast, you might actually be able to comprehend who I am: General V'rass'ha nor Tak of the Prime Force, in charge of securing the dimensional shunt that opens into your primitive city — and in charge of spreading it wide, to flood your planet's systems with millions of units of the greatest catalyst it has ever known."

A low urgent grunt pulled the narrow focus of Jack's drugged attention past her — to Gwen, sitting directly across the five-metre-wide room from him in an identical chair, her left elbow almost touching the glass of the window overlooking the rest of the Hub. She was staring at him with huge dark eyes full of mute panic, and although her face was serene and her posture upright, her quick breathing betrayed the depth of her agitation. Meeting her unblinking gaze, he could almost hear her mentally screaming: _Jack, I can't move, oh God, get me out of this, get me out, out,_ ** _out_** _—_

He tried to offer her even a trace of a reassuring nod. His neck muscles, still bound in chemical thrall, refused to obey even that simple command. 

The General's gaze followed his. "And this — is this your mate? Unlikely: she doesn't bear enough of your scent." Another sniff, her broad nose actually pressed into Jack's hair this time. She petted his shoulder as if trying to soothe him. "But you want her, oh yes — that's clear to be _n'garr_ ed…"

He closed his eyes and ignored that dark insinuating voice, marshalling his mental powers by sheer force of will. He was having trouble focussing his vision consistently, but he could tell that they weren't alone in the interrogation room: the table had been moved right up against the wall under the screen at the back of the space, and somebody was walking slowly around it, picking objects up and replacing them again. There were two other bodies in the room, one beside the table and one at the doorway leading to the short hallway that led, in turn, to the stairs down to the main level. So: four enemy combatants within striking distance, if only he had control of his body, and three more below, for a total of seven. Torchwood Three had faced far worse odds.

But they hadn't been paralyzed at the time, and he'd bet any money that the device he felt digging into his spine, like the small dark insectoid shape he'd glimpsed on the back of Tosh's neck even at that distance, was some kind of neural control unit. Unless Ianto had managed to escape the Vore sweep and find some place to hole up until he could figure out a plan of attack, things weren't exactly looking —

The threatening prick of poisonous nails through his shirt and t-shirt brought him sharply back to his immediate environment, and to the General's grim face looming over him. "Heed me when I'm speaking, proud bull, or I'll fill that one —" A flick of her chin toward Gwen. "— to the brim with agony. You may not have tupped her, but she's still part of your herd, yes? And you don't want any of them screaming out their lives a moment earlier than necessary, do you?"

Gwen swallowed, a small desperate sound, while Jack met the General's gaze with a glare of fire and steel. "Lay one hand on her," he growled, "so much as _touch_ any of them… and I'll —"

"— you'll watch them writhe in _j'kar'ta'_ s embrace," the alien warrior stated, "until it pleases me to release them, or until they die in its grasp."

He couldn't seem to get his breathing under control: it thundered in his chest, like an engine driving toward explosion. "We won't — give you the Rift — no matter — what you —"

"You already have." She took hold of his chin with the carefully curved fingers of her left hand, turning his head again so he could see Tosh on the main level: she was standing now at stiff attention a little distance from the computer station, and one of the two enemy aliens that bore a flash of white across its shoulders was sitting in her chair, studying an interface that Jack recognized: the Rift Equations module. "It takes so little, really, with the Unevolved: we threatened to kill your Flesh-Shaper, and your Mathematician gave us everything we wanted. It is all in accordance with the Rules of Destiny." Leaning closer now, to almost whisper in his ear: "They expect you to save them, I think, before it's too late. Unfortunately for them, 'too late' is now only minutes away — and you…"

Jack's jaw clenched at the sibilant hiss of those words. He could feel Gwen's gaze on him, silently screaming, pleading for rescue. He could feel his own body, open to any touch his enemy chose to inflict, utterly vulnerable — 

"… you have no options left, August Leader." Matter-of-fact now. "We've caught them all: your scientists, your second-in-command… even your prim little Archivist, neatly tied up. Our Slaver has taken a particular fancy to him: it seems he prefers his males with a certain degree of… softness. So he, at least, may well outlive you all…"

 _No!_ The image of Ianto in chains, naked, being sexually used without consideration or love, tore Jack's heart open in a burst of black fury. With a supreme effort of will he gathered his determination and his rage for a full-out assault against the chains that bound his disobedient flesh. If sheer mental and emotional force could have overwhelmed Vore technology, he would have leaped out of his seat and seized the General by her slender gilled throat and sent her crashing through the window's glass to her death, smashed to pieces on the cold metal deck far below.

His fingers tightened briefly on the arms of his chair. Nothing more.

"… all except you, of course. You, we already have a buyer for. After all," and he could hear the smile in her voice, full of dreadful promise, "the possibilities for entertainment when it comes to an immortal slave are virtually endless, wouldn't you agree? I was even tempted to put in a bid for you myself, although of course I wouldn't have the leisure to use you properly for weeks to come: subduing a planet is such a time-consuming process, even for the Evolved who possess the ineffable weaponry of _j'kar'ta."_

Jack's mind had barely begun to process all the catastrophic implications of those statements when his ears picked up something even more ominous: the background hum of the part of the Rift that was enshrined within the Hub changed in timbre again, from a soft background wail to a more discordant note designating greater stress across a wider range of its frequencies. And he could only watch helplessly as the second Vore wearing white on its shoulders rose upright from where it had been kneeling in front of the Rift Manipulator's service access panel, the glow from within painting its flat face with hellish orange light.

That was bad enough. The ethereal tendrils of pale golden light that were now drifting out of the Manipulator's apex, writhing along the rocky ceiling and flickering in and out of existence in this dimension — 

"No…" That single choked word was all Jack could manage to accomplish. And that wasn't going to be anywhere near enough to stop what was coming — the Rift torn wide open, and waves of alien shock troops flooding the streets of Cardiff… followed by the unsuspecting world beyond. 


	14. Chapter Thirteen: Mind Games (T-1.4)

"Yes," the General affirmed, with a note of such teasing mirth that Jack had to close his eyes again against a surge of almost blinding hatred. "But for the moment, you are mine — and I intend to make the most of the opportunity. Your scent tells a greater tale than you can possibly imagine…"

She went down on one armoured knee beside Jack's chair, leaning in close enough that the predatory musk of her washed over him in a sickening wave — and licked the line of his jaw, quickly and delicately. The contact left his skin cold and wet and tingling, although the shudder of his revulsion got no further than his core. When she drew back again it was to close her eyes in a moment of silence, like a connoisseur savouring a particularly fine mouthful of wine. 

"For example, you were infused with chemical coercives before I even arrived." She reached up and around to trail a delicate sharp fingertip down the nape of Jack's neck without cutting his skin, carefully skirting the paralyzer implant. "A skillful blend," she half-sang, "for a flesh-shaper on this primitive world…" Her golden eyes opened to regard him at close range, seeking to delve into his soul. "And a draught meant, I think, to kill both lust and love. Tell me, Immortal Leader, if you value the hide of your pretty Deputy: What desire are you fleeing with such desperation? Whose eyes have stricken you to what passes for your soul?"

She waited. Jack kept his lips closed tight and his gaze fixed at a point just above Gwen's right ear, managing to keep his breathing under control this time. After a few interminable heartbeats the General continued idly: "It is of no consequence. Your brain will be reshaped… or perhaps, if your buyer is the sadist our Slaver anticipates, they will choose to leave your emotions intact. Perhaps they will use a neural imager to bring your lover's face to mind again and again, broken through a thousand permutations of death while you scream out your agony, compelled to witness her — or is it 'his'? — destruction again and again, forever." 

Gwen was almost panting; although he didn't dare look at her face, couldn't risk directing the General's attention, Jack could sense the straining of her nerves as if they shared one body, trying to overcome the effects of her own paralyzer. The General's fingertips drifted free of Jack's neck, and she crossed to Gwen's side without haste, and reached out… Gwen's strangled gasp when those keen fingernails caressed the line of her throat went straight to Jack's gut.  "Tell me," the General hummed, "or I'll give this one a long, deep taste of the seventh level torment- _j'kar'ta._ "

"Nobody here," he said, because it was the only answer that was safe. The wounded depths of Gwen's eyes, darting from the General's face to his, told him that he'd drawn blood anyway. He met her gaze directly, the briefest unspoken apology, before turning his attention back to the General and crafting each word with an effort of will: "Someone… off-world. Pretty little hermaphrodite… a dancer… legs for miles, and six eyes the colour of —"

In three long strides she was back at his side, curving her slender right hand around the nape of his neck to press the paralyzing insectoid unit deeper into his flesh, while the flick of her razored thumbnail drew a burning line of blood just below his left earlobe. A fraction of a second later his mind lurched on its foundations, tilting and sliding not toward blackness, but toward a terrible sheet of light: it burned every shadow away and left him writhing, utterly exposed, every emotional sinew stripped naked and raw. He heard himself choking out screams, one after another, each one dragged from his depths 

_the Valiant, the Master's cruel drawl, each word like a drop of poison searing his skin, clamped down with rings of cold metal, probing, tearing, peeling open_

each one a breathless howl of denial: "No, no, no, _no_ —"

" _Jack!_ " Gwen was trying to reach him, he could feel it in his bones. He tried to reach back, but their bodies were dead around them

_— never held her, I never really did and now I never will —_

and all he could do was repeat the litany

"— no, no, _no no no_ —"

not only against the pain, because the pain wasn't the worst part of it, not by a long shot, no, if the light pierced to the depths of him, if it broke open the vault of his darkest secrets — 

 _— the Vault —_  

Something in his heart clenched in a spasm of bright pain, flooding his whole body with a blaze of red protective fury that focussed his mind wonderfully and slammed his physical agony to the sidelines. His eyes snapped open to glare into the General's attentive face, leaning close enough that he could have savaged her with his teeth — if only his body had been his own. 

"Touch him," he snarled through the broken glass in his throat, "and I'll kill you. All of you. In ways you can't even begin to imagine."

The one clear thought he had left amidst the haze of Vore biochemical coercion was desperately grim: _Goddess, let her toxin have cancelled out Owen's suppressants, because if they're still in effect I'm so completely, utterly, desperately fucked…_

The General's ears visibly pricked up. " _Him_ , you say? And if you're threatening death for the crime of laying hands on him, then he's likely here, close enough for your convenience." Her long fingers caressed his neck, stroking up into his hair slowly, almost fondly. "Which means either the Flesh-Shaper or the Archivist, and my guess would be…" 

He clamped his jaw tightly shut. She studied him for a span of taut seconds, her hair a slowly writhing frame around her intent face, before removing her hand and straightening to her full height and fixing him with a ruthlessly merry gaze. "Ah! An even more entertaining diversion! Why don't we bring them both up here, and see which one's shrieks under torture cause the greater disturbance in your metabolic profile?"

 _Ianto!_ His heart clenched again, this time in a spasm of near-panic. _Ianto, no, this isn't, not_ ** _him_** _, not —_

From the vicinity of the table, a whining male voice rose in protest: "Enlightened General, with all due respect —!"

"Silence, Flesh Peddler!" She was looking away from Jack now, but he could clearly visualize the proud flash of scorn in her eyes. "You'll have your prize — after I've done playing with it. Surely your own _j'kar'ta_ is more that capable of mending a few tears and breaks?" 

Another whine, more piercing: "But his _heart_ , Illustrious —"

"He is young and strong," the General hissed contemptuously. "If his heart fails, he wouldn't have endured your games long in any case. Now go back to fingering your little pile of treasures, and hold your miserable tongue!"

The General was turning away, gesturing toward whoever was standing in the doorway out of Jack's line of sight. His heart was pounding in his chest, his tongue overlaid with a taste as bitter as black ashes. They'd bring in Ianto and Owen, and torture them both for an evening's amusement while troops marched through the Rift, and there wouldn't be a damned thing Jack could do about it except watch, and listen, and feel his soul bleed out with every —

Gwen was staring at him, trying to speak, but the words were trapped in her lovely throat and all she could do was plead with her gaze. Jack had always been able to answer her before, to comfort her with his clever words and defend her with his strong body, but now…

Now, no matter how much his mind raced, nothing even vaguely resembling a workable plan was emerging. Maybe the blend of drugs in his body was messing him up so badly that he was missing the obvious — or maybe, with a paralyzer locking him inside his own body and the Rift about to open and the torture of his lover on the immediate horizon, there really were no options under the current set of circumstances. 

Unless something changed, and soon…

He found that he the General's latest dose of poison must have weakened the controlling grasp of the device wrapped around his spine, because he was able to turn his head slightly to his right, to avert his gaze from the woman he loved — and had failed. The whole world would pay for his miscalculation about last night's rift, but her death… her death he would suffer most of all.

As he stared at his own dim reflection in the glass, the image of failure that would haunt him forever, he was so consumed by the dark intensity of his anger and his regret that he nearly missed the sharp burst of newly anomalous sound on the lower level. It came faintly through the window glass, accompanied by a flash of pale blue light: a distinctive piercing whine in the key of G minor.

His first thought, as his eyes shifted focus into the well of the Hub, was: _Who the hell brought a defective Jukot-57 blast pistol to the party?_  

His second thought, as his heart — still aching at the prospect of blood smeared on Ianto's warm human skin and Gwen's beautiful eyes glazed in death — nearly stopped all over again, was: _It can't be! It's impossible!_

But there was no denying the chaos being sown below — and there was certainly no denying the utterly unexpected cause.


	15. Chapter Fourteen: Dark Horse (T-1.3)

There were six stationary figures currently visible on the main level from Jack's perspective. Two of them, Owen seated in his chair and Tosh standing stiffly at attention, were incapable of moving; the two Vore with white in their organic uniforms, one sitting at Tosh's station and the other still standing in front of the Rift Manipulator's open service panel, were staring east in the direction of the arch leading to the Vaults; and the other two —

Make that one and a half, more or less. Only hips and a pair of legs was left of the individual who'd moved into the lower edge of Jack's line of sight while he was occupied with the General: as he stared they folded and fell sideways, spilling blood and bits of internal organs onto the metal deck. The intact soldier, closer to the Rift Manipulator, had raised her rifle and was firing glowing rounds, likely superheated plasma bullets, toward the archway —

— but her target was already on the move, and coming in fast.

KITT arrowed down the walkway toward the centre of the Hub at a dead run, absorbing the impacts of several rounds that punched into his body and seared away patches of his jumpsuit without appreciably slowing him down. Instead of continuing straight at the remaining soldier on a trajectory that would have put Tosh directly in the enemy's line of fire, he veered to his left, effortlessly leaping three metres vertically onto the curving metal staircase and kicking off it as if he were in a parkour competition and going for even higher ground. The soldier tried to track his rapid ascent, still firing, but not fast enough: her bullets flew wide, and a half-second later a beam of ravening blue light from the android's right hand tore apart her upper body from above. KITT changed course with a glancing kick of his left foot to the Rift Manipulator's metal housing, seven metres up, and when he landed on the western side of the deck less than a second later, in a shallow crouch as graceful as if he'd dropped only an arm's length, the two technicians were staring at him with lipless mouths agape, evidently too stunned to pull their weapons. 

The android straightened and turned, thin curls of smoke rising from his still-smouldering wounds. He spoke in a clear commanding voice: "I'd advise you to surrender, or I'll be forced to —"

Their paralysis broke at the same instant. The one beside the Rift Manipulator fumbled for her gun; the other had the presence of mind to whip her small firearm out of its sheath as she started to stand, swinging its muzzle in Tosh's direction. Quicker than a striking snake KITT raised both hands, and Jack could see the stray tendrils of hair over Tosh's left ear fry off as a bolt of bright energy seared past her at close range, disintegrating her would-be attackers skull.

Jack couldn't hear anything as low as a standard conversational tone at this distance, but he was fairly sure that Owen, who'd felt that same bolt sizzle by just over his head, was probably swearing a blue streak mentally if nothing else. 

To Jack's left, by the table, a contralto female voice — definitely not the Slaver — yelled something in a fluid tongue that was probably the Vore's native language. 

Below, body parts had stopped falling and the gazes of mathematician and robot met across the intervening ten or so metres of now-clear deck. "Are you all right?" KITT snapped.

Tosh could barely nod, but she did the best she could. Certainly she could move her eyes — and she did, looking up toward the interrogation room. KITT turned to follow her gaze, and for a fraction of a second Jack was looking straight into his eyes, their crimson highlights cycling rapidly with the speed of his internal calculations.

_No…_

Jack's chest unlocked, permitting him to finally inhale: the grace and beauty and power of what he'd just witnessed had temporarily taken his breath away. Deep within his paralyzed body something primal stirred, trying to pull him forward: less intense than before the injection of Owen's suppressant cocktail, but still strong enough to make him ache and burn. He would have reeled back if he'd been capable of it, would have thrown up both hands to shield his face from the sight —

— but he couldn't. The General was striding round between him and Gwen, drawing her own ornate handheld firearm and peering into the well of the Hub. Jack hazarded a glance to his left and saw two more soldiers coming in to flank her, and beyond them a male Vore in much brighter and less substantial cladding, backing up against the displaced interrogation room table with his sapphire eyes wide behind their smoked goggles, and his pink gill-slits fluttering rapidly.

Gwen was still trying to move: Jack could feel her internal struggle, so desperate for all that it was almost entirely silent.

The General was barking orders in that same incomprehensible language, but Jack could already tell she was making a critical error: she thought she had time, the time it would take even a swift person to run up the stairs and come down the hallway leading to their present location. She thought she had a few seconds' leisure to prepare for an assault from that direction by a single opponent. She might even have been thinking _hostages_ — 

But KITT wasn't going to bother with such formalities. He sprinted several metres away from the interrogation room in Tosh's direction, turned swiftly, and surged forward again at top speed. This time his leap was much higher, assisted by a burst of energy directed toward the deck behind him by his outstretched left hand— and as he came he levelled his open right palm at the centre window of his target, the gaps between his spread fingers already full of blue radiance flaring toward overload. 

Jack turned his face hard away and squeezed his eyes shut, anticipating the flash that still burned through his tightly closed eyelids as the android's energy attack punched the window violently inward. Glass sprayed through the air, a few stray fragments peppering Jack's face and hair. He felt as much as heard the robot land, and fire again twice while someone screamed long and shrill — a shriek that cut off sharply as KITT strode swiftly forward — and then an abortive scuffle, ending in a heavy thud that shook the floor of the interrogation room. When he cracked open his eyes again the scene that met his gaze was one of destruction: two dead soldiers with significant portions of their bodies missing, the carpet littered with glass fragments interspersed with splashes of muddy red blood, energy marks scorched into the walls and the main computer screen an exploded ruin, the intact Slaver face-down on the floor at the foot of the steel-topped conference table — and KITT standing over the General, pinning her to the conference table's steel top. His left hand was wrapped around her right wrist, digging steel-boned fingertips into her tendons until her spasming fingers let the firearm clatter to the carpet. His other hand was locked around her slender throat, holding her in place as she thrashed and struck and fought to escape his hold, to absolutely no effect.

Jack couldn't see KITT's face at this angle, but that penetrating voice betrayed both impatience and anger: "I'd advise you to reverse whatever it is you've done _immediately_ , before I really lose my temper."

She grinned up at him as if he'd just told a marvellous joke, clutching at his forearm with her free hand. She might as well have tried to shift the grip of a steel statue. "Or — you'll do what — _machine?_ Kill me?"

"I suspect I can do something even worse than that," KITT said in a silky thoughtful way that glided along Jack's spine like ice, and as he stared the back of the robot's right hand sprouted those slender blue tentacles — four this time, lithe and glowing, snaking upward toward the General's temples.

She had only a split second to register them, and the horror they represented, before they sliced into her beautifully dark skin, sinking into the skull beneath — and, Jack could tell, even deeper. Every muscle in her body snapped taut, driving a strangled gargling gasp from her rapidly constricted lungs as she locked up in a rictus that looked exactly like the agony of ten thousand volts of electricity.

The chill settled in Jack's bones, binding him with far colder chains. Obviously inorganic technology wasn't the only thing this other-dimensional machine was capable of interfacing with…

"I'm sorry," KITT said quietly as radiance more purple began flow back up into his arm and the General relaxed, spasmed, and relaxed again, "but you leave me no choice. If you won't shut that portal down willingly, I'll be compelled to —"

The General's only response was a wider grin, and a movement of her jaw that made Jack want to shout out a swift warning. But his reflexes were still slowed, and all he managed to do was open his mouth before the poison capsule was crushed between her teeth. For a couple of seconds she stared up at the android looming over her, a sparkle of merry laughter in her eyes; then her struggles renewed, more savage and more sporadic — a ragged shuddering inhalation, arched clawing fingers, a convulsive twist of her limber spine as her polished boot-heels drummed a tattoo of death on the table's wooden edge. 

KITT made a pained whining noise and swiftly retracted his probes, bending over in a brief spasm of his own as the Vore warrior twisted in his grip one last time, ground out her final rattling breath, then sprawled completely limp.

For a couple of seconds the android stood in place, shuddering as the tendrils slid back into his body. "No," he breathed, and stared down at the corpse for a dazed moment before jerking his hands away and taking a stiff step backward. "I — no, I didn't —"

"KITT!" Jack finally managed to get his mouth to work. KITT's head snapped around, that crimson and ebony gaze locking onto his face at once. "The Rift — shut it —down —"

"I can't!" He turned in place, almost stumbling, and took a step in Jack's direction, holding out both hands as if in appeal — or apology. The gleaming gash in his forehead had stopped smoking, but it equally clearly wasn't repairing itself. "The necessary data — I didn't find it before she — I don't have the expertise!"

 _And you killed both the technicians who could have done it instead._ Jack briefly closed his eyes, his trapped mind racing as he tried to figure some way out of this deadly situation. At least one aspect of the problem had considerably improved: the enemy force had been eliminated, unless there were more of them scattered throughout the complex. Which meant that like it or not, before anything else he had to get that particular intel in the most efficient way possible. "Go downstairs — to Tosh's station, and access the CCTV feed through… the video camera icon, lower left corner of the —"

"I'm not leaving you here like this!"  

After offering a swift silent prayer to the Goddess he didn't believe in for patience and luck, he opened his eyes and met the android's dismayed gaze squarely, trying for telepathy: _Don't spin out on me now, damn you!_ Aloud he spoke as evenly as he could: "We'll — be fine. Need to know… how many more hostiles —" 

"There are no more," KITT replied at once. He tore his eyes away from Jack and looked around the room, first at the partially disintegrated soldiers, then back toward the intact but very dead General. When his gaze returned to Jack's face he raised his chin in sorrowful defiance, and stated: "I've — neutralized them. All of them."

Well, there was one piece of good news in the midst of this clusterfuck — if it were true. "Tell me… you're sure," Jack demanded. "Tell me — _how_ you're sure." 

"It was all there in your closed circuit TV records," the android replied in a crisper, more businesslike tone. "I cross-referenced the footage with Ms. Sato's Rift readings, and reviewed the relevant —" 

Every short hair on Jack's body abruptly stood on end. "Listen!" he commanded.

KITT stopped at once, cocking his head. "What, exactly, am I —?"

"That!" The troubling questions of exactly how a thoroughly deactivated robot had come back to 'life' and hacked into the Hub's core systems was shunted straight to the back burner by that deeper throbbing hum, resonating in every one of Jack's two hundred and ten bones. The discordance of it made him feel both vaguely ill and as if he was about to jump out of his own skin. "Can't you — hear it?"

Under these circumstances, the resulting scowl shouldn't have been anywhere near so adorable. "I'm not entirely sure I —"

"The Rift!" He wanted to grab the android's slim shoulders and shake it until he forced some sense into it; he tried to stand again, but even the full violence of his frustrated anger wasn't anywhere near enough to overcome the General's combination of venom and technology. "Whatever the Vore did to it — it just picked up speed!"

KITT's gaze shifted into the well of the Hub. His expression of puzzlement turned to one of amazement, and Jack could see the patterns of rising radiance shifting over his face and bullet hole-marked body. "You mean —?"

"It's opening!" He looked to his right, toward the spreading and quickening patterns of tears in the fabric of reality, then back to the android who alone among them retained the power of motion. "Whatever you learned — use it! _Now!_ "


	16. Chapter Fifteen: Into the Light (T-1.2)

KITT stared back at him as if he was either terminally stupid or insane. "I told you — I have no idea what to do! Advanced Rift Manipulator equations are hardly a function of my programming, much less —"

Jack cut him off with a growl: "Then rip the — paralyzer — off my spine."

KITT stared for another precious two seconds, his gaze locking onto the nape of Jack's neck while his artificial pupils expanded and contracted even more rapidly. "That device tapped into your central nervous system? But if I did that, it could kill you!"

"If we don't stop — the Rift — from opening — we'll all be dead!" Jack had no time to waste with the niceties of an immortality lecture, even if he'd been inclined to disclose his ace in the hole so easily. He spared a sidelong glance for Gwen, who was watching their exchange as if it were a tennis match being played with live thermal grenades, before giving the android his best Command Level Glare. "Just — quit arguing and _do it!_ "

"I can't!" KITT's drew himself up to his full height, squaring his shoulders decisively even as he apologized: "I'm sorry, but I'm not permitted to jeopardize —"

Then his eyes, full of whirling distressed spikes, abruptly snapped into smooth focus. He spun round and strode back to the General's body, grabbing something off her belt: a small oval object, as organic as the rest of the Vore equipment. "But this — this I may be able to figure out!" 

He turned in Jack's direction again, holding up the module in his left hand and extruding two delicate tendrils from the palm of his right; within a second they'd found ports in its carapace and slithered inside them. "It's the control module for those life forms currently implanted in your necks, according to the data I was able to obtain before she…" A brief shadow of horror crossed his face before it settled back into lines of fierce determination. "If I can decipher its protocols and gain access to its systems, maybe I can —"

— _set us free_ , Jack finished mentally, although KITT didn't speak the final words: a grimace of pain interrupted him, his eyes squeezing closed as a flash of poisonous green energy raced over his visible skin from the arm doing the probing.

"Vir-viral de-fense sys-systems," he managed to say brokenly, his voice juddering like a badly scratched record as blue and green warred in the circuitry channels beneath his hide. "Cou-cou-counter-co-coding…"

Even over the deepening roar of the distressed Rift, Jack could hear Gwen's breathing: deep, swift, harsh. She was well aware what was at stake if KITT were to fail, whether it be by succumbing to the device's protective programming or by running out of time. But only four seconds passed before the green in his embellishments was overwhelmed with a lasting flush of healthier blue, and he opened his eyes again, clear and bright and immediately locked onto Jack's face. "I've gained partial access! Who do you want me to free first?"

"Tosh!" Jack and Gwen got the name out simultaneously: of all of them, she had the best chance of figuring out what the Vore technicians had done to the Rift Manipulator and reversing its effects. KITT closed his eyes, visibly concentrating, and Jack counted seven more seconds before Tosh's voice rose frantically from the well of the Hub: "Jack! Gwen! Ianto! Can anybody hear me?"

KITT didn't ask who he should free next, but Jack felt the grip of the paralyzer on his spine loosen and open about three seconds later. His first action was to reach up and rip it off the nape of his neck, casting it onto the floor and grinding its small writhing body beneath his boot; his second was to snap another order at KITT — "Owen next, then Gwen, then Ianto!" — before bolting out of the room and down the short hallway toward the staircase, bellowing at the top of his lungs: "Tosh, the Rift — close it, _now!_ "

Hurtling down the stairs to the main level, he saw that Tosh was already back at her station's keyboards, intent on its screens and ignoring the headless alien corpse sprawled less than a metre away. Jack sprinted for his office, leaping over the remains of a Vore soldier in the process, and snatched his Webley out of its handy desk drawer, never happier that he kept it loaded and ready at all times. As he burst back out onto the main level he saw Owen, his dark eyes wide with a combination of revulsion and fury, crushing something into the metal deck with his heel before kicking his chair over to the free computer station.

"How long've we got?" he demanded, tapping at the keyboards with lightning speed while veils of lethal golden radiance shimmered and spread along the ceiling high overhead.

"Fifty-six seconds until the Rift opens!" Tosh yelled back over the background pulse, her own fingers a blur while data grids and scans whipped across her screens. "They inserted a dead man's switch program into the Rift Manipulator interface — it's corrupted the shutdown protocols! Sending you ten partial equations —"

" _Ten?_ " Owen yelped.

"Just do it!"

As Jack skidded to a halt in the centre of the Hub's main deck, pistol at the ready, and tilted his head back to gaze up at the slice of the shuddering Rift contained within his domain, his undying heart clenched and sank in the face of its enormity. If Tosh was sending Owen ten equations to repair, that meant she was keeping even more for herself, and at forty-eight seconds and counting…

It wasn't going to be enough. Already the Rift was starting to groan in a way that made Jack's bones quake, announcing the imminent birth of something huge — or enough small somethings to stretch it beyond the breaking point. 

And the only weapon currently on deck was Jack's own gun. Even if Ianto wasn't physically bound and was able to raid the weapons locker, the factotum wouldn't have enough time to grab something capable of wiping out a force that size… and the rest of Cardiff had no idea what was coming.

Jack glanced at his wristwatch. It was 11:32:46 PM. Most of the city would be asleep this late on a Tuesday night: hundreds of thousands of people warm and snug in their beds, never dreaming that tears in reality were opening on every street, about to disgorge a nightmare beyond their comprehension…

Tosh's voice rose another half-octave: "Detecting activity inside the Rift! Tens of objects — no, hundreds — thousands — _tens_ of thousands —"

"Fuck," Own was muttering under his breath as he coded, his flat face even paler than usual in the sickly hectic light spilling over him from above, "fuck, shit, piss, _fuck_ —" 

… a nightmare that Jack had the power to stop.

"Tosh!" he called across the intervening distance, "Owen — initiate Code Black!"

From the stairs behind him, an urgent cry: "Jack, _no!_ "

He whipped around to look up and meet Gwen's devastated eyes. "It's the only way!" he shouted back over the rising howl of the Rift. "If we overload the Rift Manipulator and destroy the Hub, it'll disrupt the formation of the portal —"

"— and leave the Rift unregulated!" Her black hair was stirring around her face as the air currents in the room began to churn, and her eyes seemed to burn into his soul: _And kill us all, Jack, did you somehow miss that part?_ "There's got to be a another way!"

"There isn't!" He stared at her a moment longer — she was only a few metres away, but the distance between them was so much greater, the distance of her love for Rhys times all the things they hadn't said — 

He sprinted across the deck and up the stairs. He wrapped his left arm around her waist and pressed a final kiss to her cheek, passionately tender, and he felt her lean into him, her arms wrapping around his waist in turn as she surrendered to inevitability. She knew her duty, and she embraced it as she embraced him, and in that moment he loved her more than even his timeless heart could contain.

He smiled at her loveliness one final time, raising his free hand to gently touch her face. He could feel tears welling in his eyes. This time he let her see them, let them ache in his voice: "It's been an honour, Gwen Cooper." 

She kissed him back — on the mouth, not quite daring to linger. But he felt it. Oh yes, he felt it in ways he would remember for all eternity.

When their lips parted he turned, his arm still encircling his love, and shouted again: "Code Black, on my —"

" _No!_ " 

This time the cry came from above, from the remains of the interrogation room. When Jack and Gwen looked up they saw KITT's slender form framed in the shattered window, the torn edges of his jumpsuit fluttering in the breezes of the oncoming apocalypse as he stared at the chaos swirling overhead with ebony eyes inscribed with their own red fire. 

"I can close the Rift!" He looked down at Jack, pitching his voice as if speaking to him alone. "I did it before, I can do it —" 

Tosh, still typing madly, interrupted him: "The phase variance is a factor of two hundred and twelve greater! The backblast will blow you apart!"

"Given the choice between my continued existence or the future of the human race…" He was still looking at Jack. A thin smile quirked one corner of his expressive mouth, heartbreakingly beautiful as he braced himself to fire —

— and Jack would remember that too, would never forget the way the sight of that unflinching courage moved something deep within him, breaking something so fundamental it made him want to die himself —

_You knew my Name…_

— before KITT turned his face toward the Hub's centre and raised his right hand, glowing palm outward. "Everybody, _get down!_ "

The last thing Jack saw before everything went white-gold was that smile, cocky and sorrowful and unutterably brave because KITT hadn't signed up for this, he could have taken to the tunnels and gotten away without ever engaging the enemy, he could even have thrown his lot in with the Vore…

The explosion was a physical force, slamming down on them all like a huge hand. Jack grip on the handrail kept him upright, and Gwen's hold on him kept her upright too. They rode it out together, eyes closed tight against the rush of blazing light…

… and the next thing Jack saw, when he could blink his eyes clear again and raise his cheek from Gwen's hair, was that the Hub was silent and dark. Emergency lighting glowed dimly around the perimeter, revealing Tosh and Owen just raising their heads from the shelter of their arms as their screens flickered back to life, one by one. Beyond them Jack could see Ianto's pale face in the archway leading down to Cold Storage, staring at Jack and Gwen holding each other with wide questioning eyes. Jack knew the question he was asking — it had nothing to do with Gwen at all, or next to nothing anyway — and he nodded, confirming that the worst was over. 

After a few seconds of cross-checking her readings, Tosh formally announced: "The Rift is closed. All energy signatures and reactivity profiles are returning to normal ranges."

Owen slumped in his chair, exhaling a sharp gust of breath. "Bloody hell, that was too close for comfort!"

Jack left Gwen standing on the stairs and headed to Tosh's station, peering over her shoulder. "Any signs of Vore incursion into our dimension?" 

Tosh called up some more scans and shook her head decisively. "None. Everything's quiet."

"What the _hell_ just happened?" Ianto demanded, coming slowly across the walkway as if he was still afraid the dismembered corpses on the deck might decide they had a bit more life left in them. Everybody looked to Jack — 

— but Jack had turned to look somewhere else: up, toward the interrogation room. Or what was left of it: the frame of the shattered window was empty now, except for a pall of thin black smoke drifting slowly out of the charred ruins.

They'd won.

And at the same time, they'd lost something they never should have had in the first place. 


	17. Chapter Sixteen: The Valley of the Shadow (T-1.1)

Eyes fixed on his goal, Jack strode back to the stairway and started up it, giving his gun to Gwen in passing; she accepted it silently, her eyes frowning a query that he answered only with a passing quirk of a smile — a smile he was fairly sure failed to be half as cavalier as he would have liked. He took the stairs two at a time, but had to pause at the top to give the ventilation systems several more seconds to suck away enough of the acrid smoke that he wasn't in danger of outright choking on it.  

He could still feel their eyes on him from below: his team, wondering why he'd hared off without even pausing to issue a single order. But he knew that Gwen would make sure everybody was all right, and at the moment an even more magnetic force was drawing him inexorably away. As soon as the air was clear enough to breathe without coughing he entered the short hallway, ignoring the debris that crunched under his boots as he stepped through into a scene of charred and fractured ruin.

KITT was lying in the collapsed remains of the conference table, close to the carbonized corpse of the General and the Slaver — or at least, parts of his skeleton were: the cage of his chest with its compact fusion engines utterly dark, a ridge of spine still connecting it to the seared curve of his eyeless skull, the claw of the hand that hadn't fired the lethal energy beam. His lower legs, disarticulated and utterly denuded, were lying closer to the shattered window. Nothing else of him had survived: no shred of clothing, no trace of the intricate mechanisms that had sheathed his elegant internal frame.

And in what little was left, there were absolutely no signs of any trace of regeneration.

Gazing down at the android's remains, Jack felt a familiar welling of sorrow through his entire body — how many friends had he lost, in the long span of his life thus far? — but this was worse than most, because of the way this machine's pheromonal output had played on his body and his mind. He knew that now, as he knew that he could have made no claim of friendship upon it… but he found that knowing didn't appreciably diminish the persistent fever-traces of all that he'd wanted, or the depth of his longing for everything that would never have come to pass.

He could admit them now, in the face of such willing and heroic sacrifice by someone who'd endured imprisonment and interrogation at his hands — and who had still refused to abandon him and his team, or to take the easy way out. As he sank to both knees beside the remains of the android's torso he had to acknowledge that the bright burn in his eyes wasn't entirely the result of the lingering stench of smoke… 

… and that he had no idea how long it would be before the hot clench of grief in his chest finally loosened enough that he could breathe again without this all-consuming pain.

"I'm sorry." He spoke tenderly, reaching out to lay his hand lightly on the still-cooling curve of the metallic forehead. Its sleek golden hair was gone, seared away, and he'd never gotten to stroke his fingers through it even once — a single touch in shared life, too fleeting, that's all he'd been allowed. It wasn't enough. Pheromone-induced or not, he ached in every dimension — yet still he had to smile, both proud and fond. "But you did it, KITT! You saved the world…"

Careful footsteps approached him from behind, picking their way through the rubble. "Jack?" Gwen's hand came to rest on his shoulder, a weight both questioning and comforting. 

He glanced up at her, managing a smile that still didn't feel quite right. "How are they?"

"Shaken up, but alive." She tried to say it lightly, but her eyes were solemn as they shifted focus to the pitiful remnants under Jack's hand. "Is he…?"

Jack looked down again at the burned metal skull and tortured bones, closing his eyes against the howl of rage and desolation that threatened to tear itself free through his throat. It took a few seconds before he was able to speak evenly. "He's… no. There's nothing…" He had to swallow another moan before the words finally came: "He's gone." 

Her fingers tightened briefly on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she said quietly, and when he raised his free hand to lay it over hers she didn't pull away, simply interlaced her fingers with his own and stood with him there in the shadows, while the tears ran silently down his cheeks and dropped into the ashes one by one.

*************************************************

Nine minutes later, after Jack had wiped all traces of moisture from his eyes and made his way downstairs again with Gwen following close on his heels, Tosh was describing how KITT's unexpected return to active status had come about.

"As soon as I had access to the Hub's systems, I dropped the damping field on the Vault and deactivated the additional security protocols that kept KITT from accessing our data," she explained, calling up video footage on her monitors while the team gathered round her. "I figured he'd try to hack the system again as soon as he came back online, including the CCTV and the archives — and that when he did, he'd see everything the Vore had been up to."

Owen crossed his arms over his chest, peering over her shoulder intently at the footage of KITT in the Vault, out of his cell and proceeding cautiously toward the stairs leading up to the Hub's main level. "And you figured it would try to do something about it."

"I didn't know for certain what he'd do," Tosh admitted. "But if he was programmed to protect human life the way he claimed, I was fairly sure he couldn't just run away and leave us here at their mercy."

"That attack of his wasn't exactly the act of a pacifist," Gwen pointed out. 

Jack was sticking close to her: he felt flayed open and rubbed raw, and her presence was comforting because she understood, somehow, at least some small part of his misery, even if he was still trying to figure out the exact contours of it himself. He glanced down at the headless remains of the Vore tech, which Ianto and Owen had dragged just far enough to be out of the way, before musing: "His mind was from the past, but his body was from the future. Who's to say it wasn't designed for combat applications?" 

Owen nodded briskly. "We're lucky it didn't turn on us instead. You're sure it's well and truly dead?"

"As sure as I'm standing here," Jack stated curtly. He really didn't want to talk about it.

Tosh was trying to call up real-time environmental scans on the Hub's main level, and failing. "The Vore crippled most of our surveillance systems — it'll take time to get them back online. In the meantime, we'd better get what's left of KITT into storage." A glance back at Jack. "You say there was no hint of reconstructive activity on the part of his nanites?" 

He bit each syllable off crisply: "None whatsoever."

"And you would know, right?" Owen quipped with a thin smirk.

"The recoil of E-27-J energy from the Rift might have wiped their holographic memory matrix," Tosh said thoughtfully. "If that's the case —" 

"Then he's not coming back." Jack looked at the screen one final time, where a small image of KITT was sprinting up the stairwell from the Vault to tear his way through four Vore in swift succession, before shaking his head and looking away. It was still too fresh; it hurt too damned much. He clapped his hands sharply. "Okay, clean-up procedures, people — Owen, I'll need autopsies on all remains, and Tosh, start rooting out whatever code they inserted into our systems." 

"Ianto and I will take care of —" Gwen started to say, her gaze shifting toward the interrogation room, but Jack shook his head again and cut her off. 

"No." He looked up at the burned-out chasm and forced his voice to imitate a matter-of-factness he certainly didn't feel. "There's not much left. I'll look after it myself." 

 _After all, it's the last thing I'll ever be able do for you…_  

He retrieved a twenty-five litre metal storage container first, then went to the evidence room to pick up the one part of KITT's original body that had survived its trip through the initial rift. For a long moment he stood turning the hubcap in his hands — not quite admiring it, not exactly appreciating it, simply absorbing the shape and the mirrored blackness of it, as smooth as the curve of the sky on a midwinter night, with a strange silky texture almost like living flesh. 

_I'm sorry I didn't know who you were — or rather, who you really considered yourself to be…_

After several seconds he gave himself a mental shake, put the hubcap into the bottom of the box, and headed back onto the main level deck. 

_Would it have made any difference, seeing you like that — in a body nowhere close to human? I've always been attracted to beautiful things, and you_ **_were_ ** _beautiful, no question about it…_

Tosh and Owen had their heads together at one of the computer stations, discussing some esoteric point of Hub programming. Ianto was nowhere to be seen — probably in the kitchen, whipping up a couple of pots of his famous coffee and some sandwiches — but Gwen was kneeling beside the Vore technician who'd been cut down close to the Rift Manipulator, stripping objects off its belt and putting them into a small box of her own. She glanced up as Jack came out, but he didn't meet her eyes: every instinct told him that if he was going to do this, he had to do it alone.

_… one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen…_

He headed up the stairs again for hopefully the last time this awful night, every step feeling like his feet were shod with lead. This certainly wouldn't be the first time he'd gathered up a loved one's remains and consigned them to the grave, even if this love had proven to be far stranger than most.

 _… and I'm sorry,_ ** _so fucking sorry_** _, because you so much deserved better than what happened to you here…_  

He had to pause at the top of the staircase, brace the box against his hip with his left hand, and wipe fresh tears away with a brusque swipe of his right. 

_… another shot of that suppressant, oh Goddess, would it help? It has to! I'll go ask Owen once you're all squared away…_

For an instant his heart quailed within him, and he contemplated rushing back down and demanding a bolstering shot _right the fuck now_. But —

 _I can do this. I_ ** _have_** _to do this. If you're going to be locked away in the cold and the dark, the least I can do is make sure it's done with love — not just for your sake, but for the sake of the friend you told us you'd left behind…_  

So he walked down the small smokey hallway again, his heart a slow drumbeat of misery inside his ribs as he wrapped his mind tightly around the promise: _At least now that you're gone, this chemical effect will fade with time. It has to, and one day I'll be able to look back on this with a cooler head and figure out exactly what the hell was going —_  

It took him a half-second to process what he was seeing because it was the last thing he'd expected, but when it registered he stopped dead in his tracks just inside the shattered doorway, his pulse sharply quickening. The room was exactly as he'd left it: charred floor, blackened walls, shattered screens, broken table…

… but in the ruins of the table, where only partial skeletal remains had lain less than fifteen minutes before, there now reposed a lean symphony of pale limbs faintly shining in the shadows, and the gleam of a golden-haired head carelessly resting on the pillow of one folded arm. The intact figure lay curled up on its right side with the long milky spill of its back to the door, as if peacefully sleeping in the midst of the destruction, and for long seconds all Jack could do was stare, and realize that the reclining figure was breathing slowly and deeply, without pain and without haste. 

He stared, unable to breathe all over again. He kept staring, and just as he opened his mouth to say something — what, he had absolutely no idea — a pulse of pale blue washed down the android's body from nape to heels, outlining every channel of subliminal power beneath its skin. It stirred and turned over onto its back, slim arms gracefully extended over its head, before frowning like a man slowly coming awake. Its eyelids flickered open to squint at the ceiling, revealing eyes like pools of ebony ink infused with threads of red fire.

It scanned the burn marks overhead, its scowl deepening. The cyan patterns flared brighter, luminous in the dark. "Oh," it murmured as if in surprise, and as easily as that it became _he_ again, how could he possibly be anything else with that sculpted chest and those perfectly contoured abs and that soft pretty cock in its nest of golden curls? With that _voice?_ "Oh my, that was…"

Then his scan swept to his left, taking in Jack standing stunned in the doorway, and his scowl became open perplexity blended with wariness. "Captain?" he asked cautiously —

— and in the voicing of that single honorific, Jack could feel every particle of air in the room magnetize between them all over again. 


	18. Chapter Seventeen: I Shall Fear No Evil (T-0.7)

This time Jack didn't even try to fight the pull of the tides. He dropped the box without a second glance and strode forward to sink down on one knee in the ashes at KITT's side, extending his open right hand. KITT raised an eyebrow at it, but after a second's contemplation he reached up and clasped the human's forearm, letting Jack clasp his in turn and pull him to his feet. The physical contact felt like closing an electrical circuit, a surge of heat and joy so intoxicating that Jack almost laughed out loud; instead he concentrated on steadying the android with his left hand wrapped around its right bicep, and contented himself with grinning like an idiot high on Arcturian glitterdust.

As soon as he'd stopped swaying KITT looked down at their still-clasped forearms, then further down at his own nakedness — its pale perfection was marked with smudges of dust that Jack longed to smooth away — then up about three and a half inches to meet Jack's shining eyes. "We've got to stop meeting like this," he deadpanned, and this time Jack _did_ laugh, because he was _alive_ , praise the Goddess in all Her mercy, he was alive and saucy and luminous and _right there_ —

"Captain?" KITT was scanning him with clear skepticism written in every line of his face. "Are you all right? You seem excessively exuberant, considering —"

And it was good to finally shut him up the way Jack had wanted to from the moment they'd first clashed in the Vaults: directly, intensely, in a way that brooked no backtalk. This time it was quick kiss of admonishment: less than a second in duration, starting stern and ending tender, but all of it burned, and when he drew back enough to look into KITT's face again he found the android staring up at him from within the cherishing curve of his left hand, its dark eyes even wider with amazement. 

Jack simply gazed back, his grin turning roguish. He knew he was irresistible, he certainly knew _that_ expression, and his singing heart could wait for the inevitable response. 

But instead of leaning in to offer himself for more, KITT scanned Jack's face again before smiling in his turn, tentative — but not overtly displeased. "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say in response to that," he admitted.

"You don't say anything," Jack informed him with a cocky tilt of his chin. "Except maybe, 'thanks'."

"Well, then." The smile turned sardonic. "Thank you. I think." 

"You _think_?" He glanced away with another bright laugh, making no effort to hide either his incredulity or his delight. "You get kissed by Jack Harkness, the finest lover from the Shining Waste to the Void Reaches, and you only _think_ —?"

"I don't have any basis for comparison," KITT protested. He dropped his gaze briefly, to his hand sliding down Jack's forearm until palm met open palm with subtle energy humming between them, before glancing up again almost shyly. "That I can remember, anyway." A moment's consideration, his eyes tracing the curves of Jack's mouth in a way that went straight to Jack's groin, followed by a more direct gaze through lowered eyelashes and a questioning quirk of one dark eyebrow and a throatier murmur: "I don't suppose you'd consider —?"

"Jack?"  

And there was Gwen, delivering the worst cock-blocking manoeuvre Jack had been on the business end of in at least a couple of decades. He looked back over his shoulder in consternation, but it was KITT who took the crucial step away, letting go of Jack's right hand and leaving his left to fall at his side, empty and forlorn.

Gwen was standing in the doorway beside the dropped box, staring as if she couldn't believe her eyes. Jack couldn't say that he blamed her: the view, after all, was thoroughly spectacular. 

"Hello again," KITT greeted her in a considerably more professional tone, apparently not in the least discomfited by her obvious astonishment. He glanced down at his own shameless nudity — Jack couldn't help noticing that the artificial cock was reacting to their quick snog, delicate lines of faint blue rippling along the slightly longer and higher curve of it, and he had to turn his face briefly away so Gwen wouldn't see his radiant smile of outright joy. "I take it the alien invasion has been averted?"

"Um." Her gaze flickered downward, lingered a heartbeat, then snapped back up to KITT's face with alacrity and a spreading blush. She nodded jerkily. "Yes. Yes, it has."

"Well, good." He waited a beat before prompting: "I'm sorry to impose, but I don't suppose you could find me some more clothes…?"

"Uh..." Her usual eloquence seemed to have temporarily deserted her. Her eyes darted to Jack, then back to KITT, then back to Jack again, and she was very pointedly not looking below waist level, while at the same time giving the distinct impression that she wasn't at all surprised by what she was deliberately not seeing. "I mean, yes — yes, of course. But maybe you should stay up here while I go get them?"

KITT glanced around, clearly disdaining the grimy mess of shattered equipment and burned furnishings. "I suppose I _could_ ," he sniffed, so prissily that Jack wanted to seize hold of him and show him what getting dirty really meant. "After all, I don't have any place else I need to be…" Another glance at Jack, this one more cautious. "Unless you intend to put me back in that —"

"No." He shook his head decisively, then looked to Gwen, who nodded almost imperceptibly, then back to KITT, who was watching them both keenly. "I think we're a little bit past that point now." He took a step toward the exit even though the extra inches of separation ached, inviting KITT along with a little jerk of his chin and another winning smile. "C'mon downstairs — it's a helluva lot cleaner, and we all need to put our heads together and debrief anyway." 

The small frowning glance that KITT slid sidelong and upward toward Jack's face was both suspicious and oddly innocent — and in that instant Jack knew one thing for certain: KITT could never know about the effects of his own pheromonal output. He was clearly determined to safeguard human life, and if he ever learned what was really going on he'd insist on being locked away, or buried a mile underground, or permanently dismantled, or something else equally unpleasant. And if there was one thing Jack knew for certain at this point it was that nobody was ever going to imprison him again — not if Jack Harkness had anything to say about it.

Aloud, the android asked: "Are you sure your teammates won't mind my lack of attire?"

"I don't," Jack said bluntly, and led the way past Gwen toward the stairs, feeling a soaring conviction that all was right with the world in spite of the fact that the interrogation room was a total write-off and it would take weeks to entirely eradicate the lingering smell of smoke from rest of the Hub. 

They'd won, after all, this time without losing anything that mattered — and in fact, if Jack's instincts were working properly again, they might have just gained an asset that would make the unpleasantness of the past twenty-one hours completely worthwhile.

*************************************************

It wasn't quite accurate to say that the reunions on the main level were joyous, although Tosh was clearly happy to see KITT back in one piece, naked or not, and promptly thanked him for seeing to it that she hadn't gotten shot. Ianto's stare suggested profound unease even though he was superficially polite during the formal introduction, and Owen…

"Jack?" He stepped off to one side — leaving KITT and Tosh discussing what KITT had learned about Vore technology from his brief interface with the paralyzer control unit while Gwen set off to get some of Owen's spare clothes from his locker and Ianto went to fetch the coffee and sandwiches — and crooked his finger. "A word in your ear?" 

Jack joined him, not exactly happy to be pulled out of proximity to a certain gorgeous nude male android. "What?"

Owen looked him square in the eyes. "Don't touch it," he ordered without preamble. "And don't tell me you don't want to, because you're mooning around like a lovesick teenager with his first crush. If possible, don't even get within ten feet of it. Every episode of physical contact will only make the chemical connection stronger."

"I'll keep that in mind," Jack murmured in response, deliberately not saying: _Too late for that, Owen — too late for that by a country mile._ He could still feel the closed circuit between them, thrumming low and warm in every square centimetre of his awakened flesh. 

"Well…" A suspicious glare. "See that you do. I'm not going to stand by while you come under robotic mind control."

Jack glanced in KITT's direction — he was leaning over Tosh's desk to examine a particular scan she'd called up on a lower screen, the masculine curves that flowed from his shoulders all the way down to his heels positively thrilling — and in spite of the surge of possessiveness that welled up in response to being so strictly forbidden what he wanted, he had to admit that his team physician had a point. Still — 

"It's not _that_ bad," he protested.

"Oh, really?" Owen levelled a _Who do you think you're kidding?_ look from beneath lowered brows. "Just for a minute, try to think with something other than the little brain between your legs! This is already bad enough. If it keeps going, you'll wind up as the bloody thing's sex slave — or worse. I can keep you topped up with pheromonal suppressants, but the rest is entirely up to you."

Jack opened his mouth to protest, intending to cut Owen to pieces with cogent arguments and ready wit, but nothing emerged. What was he supposed to say in response to something so manifestly true? Something he had no choice but to acknowledge, in the parts of his mind and heart not currently in chemical thrall?

Owen studied him for a couple of seconds, and his flinty expression softened by one tiny degree. "Come on," he said more sympathetically, "and I'll give you another dose before I start treating all these paralyzer punctures. I can see the first one is already starting to wear off. I've got a few ideas for improving its staying power, but it'll be a process of trial and error…"

Jack followed him to the medical unit without saying a word. He might be forced to submit to the inevitable, but that didn't mean he had to do so with good grace.


	19. Epilogue: The Beginning Is Also The End (T+0.3)

So in the end Jack held KITT at last, cheek pressed close to that smooth cap of golden hair, breathing in the enthralling blend of scents that comprised the construct's perilous essence. Closing his eyes to better absorb every sensory detail in the moonlight, because it felt so finally, perfectly _right_ , even with a fresh dose of suppressants flowing through his veins. 

He was no stranger to risk. This was simply risk of a type he'd never encountered before: a game of keep-away where his body and his heart were the prize. A game where his inorganic opponent wasn't even aware there was a game in play, or that the rules were skewed so utterly in its favour.

And he'd always been so very good at games — especially those which relied on deception and misdirection. Even with such a significant handicap working against him he was confident of his ability to win, visions of warmly debauched beds and whispered Names notwithstanding.

After a decent count of seconds he shifted his grasp to the android's slim shoulders and gently held KITT in place as he, himself, took a half-step back to look down into those space-dark eyes. He could smile with the self-assurance of more-or-less simple lust now, because the pheromones were no longer working on him under cover of ignorance. He could let himself blush because KITT's hands lingered on his waist, seemingly reluctant to let him go completely, and he could let his heart skip a beat when he saw that KITT had wiped those glowing tears dry on his shoulder, accepting the comfort he'd offered in a poignantly unexpected dimension.

Oh yes, he was well aware now of what was happening to him. But just because he hadn't asked for it didn't mean he couldn't enjoy its material benefits… and he had to admit that this chemically driven attraction was indeed delectable in its magnetism, so deep and compelling and undeniably sweet.

And if he saw hints of answering attraction in return… well, unfortunately that sort of interaction wasn't factored into the set of rules he'd devised. 

"Come on," he invited, "let's go back downstairs. You'll let us scan you now, right?"

KITT nodded. "It seems I have little choice. Ms. Sato's preliminary analyses indicate that the Rift's alignment to my home dimension has been almost completely disrupted. If you can't find a way to send me back —"

"We will." He made the promise as smoothly as if it weren't a lie, because KITT deserved at least the solace of hope as partial repayment what he'd just done.

"— but if you don't, then I may very well be here… a while." He hesitated, looking down at his own hands still settled on Jack's waist, then flashed a bright considering glance up into Jack's face through half-lowered sable lashes. "I'm only going to ask for one thing."

 _Yes,_ his instincts responded instantly, _I'll hold you till the end of time, I'll shield you from all danger — I'll shelter you forever!_ Impossible, but his heart didn't seem to be having much truck with objective truth these past twenty-four hours. Aloud he simply said: "Name it." 

"Let me help you with your work." He rushed on as if fearful that Jack would say 'no' out of hand: "I was created to assist a human field agent with difficult assignments, and the prospect of being confined for an indeterminate length of time without useful employment is horribly distasteful to me. If you give me a chance, I'll amaze you — you have my word!"

Jack briefly considered telling him that he didn't have to sell himself, that he'd already proven himself to everybody's satisfaction — or to Jack's, at any rate, which was what really counted. But it wasn't in his nature to tip his entire hand to anybody, no matter how enticing, so he simply nodded and said: "I think that could be arranged. But next time no killing alien technicians until we're sure we don't need them anymore, okay?" 

KITT's smile was exultant. "Thank you, Captain! I promise I won't let you down."

"I know you won't." He curved his right hand briefly around the nape of that slender neck and let himself experience the urge to lean in and steal a kiss, even though he certainly wasn't going to indulge it — 

— even though he never could. Owen was absolutely right: the stakes were simply too high on the medical front, and on a personal front he couldn't risk revealing too much and driving KITT into retreat. Even if surrendering himself to the full experience of this strange attraction was an impossibility, he was determined to savour the things he _could_ have: physical proximity, a fulfilling professional relationship, the satisfaction of guiding and guarding, and perhaps, one day, even true friendship.

KITT had a steep learning curve ahead, getting accustomed to so much that was new: this body, this world, the mission of Torchwood and his role within it. It would be Jack's task to educate him, and that sort of relationship could have its own undeniable rewards… 

… especially when KITT was looking at him the way he was now, as if this enigmatic human he'd met in a parallel universe could serve as even a temporary replacement for the beloved pilot he'd been forced to leave behind.

As if, for this tiny slice of time, Jack was the only thing that mattered in the whole of this strange new world.

He kept his hand on the small of the KITT's back as they walked to the elevator together, relishing the simple closeness, and the secret intimacy of the gesture whose full significance its recipient was certainly unaware of. When they paused to wait for the lift doors to open and KITT looked up at him again with a trace of a smile that lit up that smoothly handsome face like a candle's glow within an elegant lamp, he told himself that the gravitational pull of yearning wasn't so bad: that he could manage this dance of attraction and resistance, this delicately balanced equation of opposing forces holding each other in check. He could do this, because the alternative was losing some vital part of his life forever, one way or the other.

The man currently known as Jack Harkness had always been comfortable with his own appetites. He certainly wasn't going to start denying himself life's little pleasures now — especially when those little pleasures were, in this case, all he could ever safely permit himself to fully claim for his own.

He dared to slowly stroke one precious inch of an android's blade-straight spine with his thumb, and to meet its otherworldly eyes with an unwavering gaze. And he told himself that it didn't matter that his own smile didn't quite match the intensity of the obsessive flame this exquisite immortal creature had managed to kindle in every aspect of him, body and mind and heart... and most inexplicably of all, in the intangible reaches of the soul he'd so often doubted he even possessed.

THE END


End file.
